The Color Museum

Where it started

I wanted to be immersed in a color. Not a swatch or a hex code on a screen, but a color with room around it, the way a Rothko fills your view when you stand close. So the first version was a hall of single colors: each wall held one framed canvas of pure color, hung low as Rothko asked, and the hall went on forever. After the last color the first came round again.

Becoming a museum

A color only looks right in the right room, so the room came next. The light follows MoMA’s Rothko room, gallery 403, baked in Blender Cycles: track heads aimed at each work about 31° off vertical, with soft beams and a little drifting dust, and broad soft light from the ceiling. The side walls are lit evenly, and only the works are lit live, calibrated so a color renders exactly at its value. The floor is satin oak with a soft reflection of the room.

Then the details a museum is made of. The light fittings are modelled on MoMA’s. Frames are ebonised wood under a satin coat, mitred at the corners. Canvases are primed linen with a faint sheen in the weave. Each work’s name is written on the wall beside it as you arrive, in a single-line script laid down in writing order, and the text looks cut into the plaster.

Once the room felt real, colors alone weren’t enough for it, and the paintings arrived.

The paintings

The museum now opens on 107 public-domain paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, by Van Gogh, Monet, Seurat, Cassatt, Caillebotte and others. Each hangs at its true size, so a small portrait is seen from closer than a large landscape, and its light, shadow and frame are fitted to it. Beside each one, the wall carries its title, the artist and year, a line about the work, and its medium and size.

The colors are still there. Double-click a painting and every wall turns back into a color field; double-click again for the paintings. The color hall opens with 47 colors from Starship launch photographs, from four palettes by Meditations in Color (made by @Pixel0Symphony), credited on screen as you stand at them, followed by the original sixteen.

The walk

There are no buttons. You scroll up and down, or swipe, to walk the hall. The walk leans in close to each work, then turns past the wall to the next, and every lean-in is a stop: one gesture can bring you to a work but never carry you past it.

• Up close you can go further in. Pinch on a phone or a trackpad to come closer to a painting, then drag or swipe to move around its surface, with a small map in the corner showing where you are in the work.
• On a desktop the pointer is a lens of liquid glass. It lifts what’s beneath it, catches the ceiling light along its rim, and swells over a painting.
• On a phone, held upright, it asks you to turn it sideways. Light haptic ticks mark settling into a lean-in and reaching full zoom.

How it’s built

• three.js for the hall, with bays that repeat around you so it never ends
• Blender Cycles and Open Image Denoise for the baked lighting, driven by the same geometry as the scene
• Lenis for the endless scroll and GSAP for timing, the fade up from dark and the handwritten labels
• Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago’s public-domain collection, with photographs from Wikimedia Commons matched to the museum’s records
• Vite, deployed on Vercel

Walk it at the-color-museum.vercel.app.