CONTRAST & COMPLIMENT
Contrast and Compliment is a panda inspired design. The giant panda’s iconic black and white coat is widely recognizable especially against its natural habitat. The black and white patches serve as opposite bodies, visually defining each other, creating individual shapes. Isolated; the shapes most often appear as elongated and distorted ellipses; bean or gourd like forms in the third dimension. The patch shapes inspire the form as a re-organized, sculpted panda that translates the program in which it encompasses.
Pandas have dichromatic vision, meaning that their eyes only have two color receptors. The human eye contains three color receptors therefore humans have trichromatic vision. The receptor absent from the panda eye is the one that allows humans to see red. This means that the panda eye only detects yellow, blue and green. Therefore what a human sees as blue a panda sees as blue, what a human sees as yellow a panda also sees as yellow and what a human sees as green a panda also sees as green. However, what a human sees as red a panda sees as green due to the receptor deficiency.
Pandas perceive the world very differently than humans, with that in mind, this design takes full advantage of our additional color receptor. The façade is a variation of red, which contrasts the landscape to the human eye. Which means that pandas will see the façade as green, disguising it as vegetation that is cohesive with the natural landscape.