CALLTHEM Mellow yellow

PULLMAN -- In Pullman, this is the world according to yellow:

Yellow fire hydrants stand on the corners of Bishop Boulevard and Grand Avenue.

An estimated 7,608 yellow-haired people live in town.

Washington State University sells 1,977 yellow parking passes for 22 yellow zones. For those who park without a pass, breaking yellow law, 12 yellow parking boots are waiting.

It takes 620 gallons of paint applied two times a year to keep the streets lined in yellow.

Four kinds of yellow soda are for sale.

In the spring, a yellow monoplane sprays the fields where vivid, yellow canola blooms.

These yellow facts were gathered for a WSU class that has been named one of the top four architecture courses in the country by the American Institute of Architects and the Associated Collegiate Schools of Architecture. The results of the project is "The Yellowtown Collection" on exhibit at the WSU Compton Union Building gallery.

Professor Paul F. Hirzel reaches up to add another piece of yellow litter to the gallery wall, which displays yellow plastic bags, crumpled flyers, a Sunny Delight box, a McDonald's hamburger wrapper, several yellow-edged Jolly Rancher wrappers, pale yellow ATM receipts and a smashed but still bright Wendy's cup.

"Yellow Submarine" by the Beatles plays in the background.

"It's another cut through the world of yellow," explains Hirzel. "What do people throw away that's yellow."

He still collects yellow garbage on his walks to and from school, even though his site and landscape design class finished his assignment of looking at their community through the color months ago.

"It remains a kind of obsession," says Hirzel. "When I see yellow I have to go see what it is."

Today it was an air freshener package.

"I didn't have one of those."

Hirzel's aim is to teach his students not to look for something no one sees, but to think what nobody has thought about what everybody sees.

He adopted the idea from the 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

The Yellowtown Collection is the latest of his unusual assignments.

One year it was reinventing the bowling alley. Each student was required to bowl three games. The group followed players, read bowling magazines and watched movies like "Kingpin" and "The Big Lebowski."

Another year it was finding the extraordinary in State Route 26, the 133-mile-long, dusty highway that 10,000 WSU students use to cross the state from Seattle.

The route was so dull it was not even mentioned in Washington State Bureau of Tourism guidebooks.

As usual, students groaned when they learned what the project was, but soon some were driving the road every weekend, fascinated by its geology and inhabitants, even its roadkill.

Next came designing a futuristic farm. Students came up with concepts like sky beds, a land mirror and AstroWheat -- synthetic wheat flooring contoured to be a rolling landscape for the living room.

"I have no preconceived idea about what the results will be," says Hirzel, who came to WSU 11 years ago after receiving his master's degree in architecture from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "The class leads the project."

He just comes up with them.

Yellowtown formed in his mind through several personal experiences that made him realize he had issues with the color, he explains.

Long ago he went on a disastrous first date wearing a yellow shirt. He didn't wear the color again.

Once he had an appointment with a counselor who arrived dressed head to foot in yellow. He couldn't imagine confiding in the man.

Then his wife told him he was a yellow, according to a personality theory that assigns individuals colors to explain their nature. Yellow people are motivated by fun and what feels good. That fits him, he says.

"My motivation for almost everything I do is if there isn't some kind of joy in the activity, I'm very disinterested in doing it."

It also colors his projects.

"What does this have to do with architecture? It's my belief that one's attitude towards place, if it's highly intelligent and pragmatic, the architecture will represent that kind of attitude. If it's a tedious and banal attitude, the results will be tedious and banal.

"If one can find a way of looking that has some kind of joy, people will be joyful who experience it."

"I think we're looking at our community in a new way," says Whitney Henion, a fifth- year architecture student who worked on the Yellowtown project. "What we ended up with is a philosophical representation of yellow. It's more than just a color."

"Just like a site is more than just a site," adds classmate Jennifer Steen. "It's color, experience and feelings."

Steen and Henion focused on yellow fashion. They spent an afternoon interviewing people wearing yellow and investigated the availability of yellow clothing. They found there were 86 articles of women's clothing for sale in Pullman, 36 for men and 49 for children.

"It's one doorway into the world," says Steen. "Once you find strange ways of seeing the world you want to find more ways.

"It's kind of like car bingo, encouraging you to interact with a landscape that might otherwise be banal and monotonous."

"Many academic problems are serious," says Hirzel. "This question has a tiny bit of comedy -- although during the process people wanted my life to come to an end."

He says ideas are simmering in his head for future projects.

"I can't divulge what they are. They (the students) will continue this effort to think the thoughts no one has had about that which everyone sees."

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Karinen may be contacted at jkarinen@lmtribune.com