What is the average Color of Palo Alto?

When the artist, Samuel Yates, set out to find the Color of Palo Alto in 2001, he had quite a feat on his hands, to photograph every property and parcel in Palo Alto, about 18,000 of them, find the average color of each house, then find the average color of each street, then neighborhood, then the entire city of Palo Alto. He spent 1 year photographing each property, carefully choosing the setting (direction of sun, time of day, etc.) of each house.

On top of finding the average color, there were many other facets to this public art project, including finding the color in a sustainable means (using solar and wind to power his electric scooter, building from recycled parts for the garage he worked in outside of Palo Alto’s Town hall), even changing his diet to vegan to represent a more sustainable lifestyle.  He then found creative ways to hook into the city’s operations and provide them with this useful data, such as a photo of every house mapped into the 911′s GIS data.)

All of this came together outside of city hall, where the entire building was draped with each photo, in the order taken (Jan 1-Dec 31, 2001).

Last night, Samuel Yates released ‘The Color of Palo Alto‘ to reveal that finding the color is quite a difficult problem, for one, what color palette to average the colors on, HSV, RGB, LAB, etc.?  Well, with HSV being invented right in Palo Alto’s Parc labs, HSV seemed like the appropriate choice.  But then do you find the arithmetic average of the most frequently occurring color, or the average of all the average colors of each property, or the most frequently color occurring in each property, then the most frequently occurring color in the whole city?

So, it’s up to the residents of Palo Alto to vote on their Color – which they will be able to purchase at paint stores and continue this public art project.