With a gap of 20 years, Le Corbusier develops 2 collections for the wallpaper company Salubra and 2 tools to choose the colors,
which he calls color keyboards. Differences between the 2 sets record 2 moments of an evolving relation between color and his
architecture. Continuing the musical metaphor proposed by the “keyboards”, we can say that while at first color plays with other
instruments of the spatial composition in a subordinate position, later it becomes a single voice engaged in variations on self-pace,
like in a polyrhythmic composition. The parallelism with music reveals that change is the nature of the composition: from gear
wheel of the “machine for living” color turns into an autonomous element of a symbolic machine.
