GoKawiilHello! This is a long, hopefully fun one! If you’re reading this in your email, you may need to click “expand” to read all the way to the end of this post. Thank you!
When I lived in Nashville, my girlfriends and I would take ourselves on “field trips” across the state. We once went on a tour to spot bald eagles in West Tennessee, and upon arrival, a woman with fluffy hair in the state park bathroom told us she had seen 113 bald eagles the day before. We ended up seeing (counts on one hand)…2.
In the summer of 2017, we went on another field trip to the National Park’s Manhattan Project Site in Oak Ridge, TN. In 1942, Oak Ridge, TN, was chosen as the site for a plutonium and uranium enrichment plant as part of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret WWII effort to develop the first atomic bomb. Once a small and rural farming community settled in the valley of East Tennessee, the swift task to create a nuclear bomb grew the secret settlement titled “Site X” from 3,000 people in 1942 to 75,000 by 1945. Alongside the population growth, enormously complex buildings were built.
A Note: The Manhattan Project created the nuclear bomb that caused extreme devastation in Japan and ended the war. There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible. Today, though, I’d like to talk about the industrial design and color theory from that era.
The Tour
Our first stop on the tour was the X-10 Graphite Reactor room and its control panel room. The X-10 Graphite Reactor, a 24-foot-square block of graphite, was the world’s second full-scale nuclear reactor. The plutonium produced from uranium there was shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico, for research into the atomic bomb Fat Man.
What caught my eye as a designer, as with most industrial plants and control rooms of that time, besides the knobs, levers, and buttons, was the use of a very specific seafoam green, seen here on the reactor’s walls and in the control panel room.
Thus began my day-long search, traipsing through the internet for historical information about this specific shade of seafoam green.
Thankfully, this path led me to the work of color theorist Faber Birren.
In the fall of 1919, Faber Birren entered the Art Institute at the University of Chicago, only to drop out in the spring of 1921 to commit himself to self-education in color, as such a program didn’t exist. He spent his days interviewing psychologists and physicists and conducted his own color studies, which were considered unconventional at the time. He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad.
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