Urbanity and rurality in the color culture

The research object is urban color as an independent cultural phenomenon, and its subject is a sociocultural context of urban coloristics. The paper presents a theoretical model of the structure of urban color, contains characteristics of formation and interaction mechanisms between the main components of the model and the analysis of a specific case proving and illustrating core principles of the basic theoretical model. A combination of two basic methods was used during the research. At the first stage a theoretical model of the structure of the urban color culture was built on the basis of document analysis. At the second stage the study was conducted with the help of case-study methodology. The sources of the research accounted for documents from the funds of archives, architectural photographs, artistic and graphical works, multicolored photo-postcards with cityscapes, documents regulating urban coloristics. The conducted theoretical and empirical analysis concluded that the key characteristic of the urban color culture is the splitting of urban coloristics into two parts - official and domestic. Each element of this dichotomous model possesses its own semantics and fulfills different social functions. The norms of urban mode of life (urbanity) are realized in official color culture. Its colors are historically changeable, progressive and subject to the so called color globalization. On the contrary, domestic color spaces represent the peculiarities of rural pattern (rurality) and possess marked territorial characteristics. [A1] Two components of urban color culture not only coexist compiling urban coloristics. They constantly interact and as a result of their interaction a certain color composition appears in urban space. Synchronic and diachronic layers of color field are easy to reconstruct. They rather precisely represent the character and disposition of social power, show the peculiarities of relations between individual and collective agents of social field, characteristic sign-symbolical codes, mechanisms of color representation and maintenance of color connotations. Together the components of urban culture form a stable system, a structure that should be taken into account while designing color compositions for modern cities.