Le Corbusier’s Colors & Real Estate

Architecture solved this problem for itself, more than once. Le Corbusier turned colour into a portable method — the Salubra keyboards above could be picked up and reapplied to any building, any client, decades apart. Bruno Taut used the same logic on Berlin’s Weimar-era housing estates, painting entire blocks so residents of near-identical buildings could finally give someone an address. Jean-Philippe Lenclos took it further: his Géographie de la couleur surveyed a region’s own vernacular materials and turned the findings into a reusable method — then sold that exact method to Renault, IBM and cities across Europe. Three theorists, three systems, one premise: colour has a job, and the job can be written down.

Branding has never quite produced its own version of this. The closest anyone came is Otl Aicher’s colour programme for the 1972 Munich Olympics — a genuinely functional system, pastel colour assigned by venue so visitors could navigate a temporary city without reading a word of German. But it lived and died with that one Olympics. Nobody wrote it up as a method another designer could pick up and reapply to a bank, a hospital or a university, the way Corbusier’s keyboards still get reissued today.

That gap is why the Kaush Brand System assigns colour by discipline, not by mood — coral for brand work, blue for tax and finance, green for AI and ethics. Not a palette chosen to look good together: a small, working version of the same argument Corbusier, Taut and Lenclos already won.