Eight of the world's most colourful buildings

Imaginative architects have long used colour to elevate their work. From a dazzling ancient temple to a vibrant library, here are eight buildings where colour is integral.

We have been using colour to bring joy for hundreds of thousands of years. Early Neanderthals decorated cave walls with pigments from the earth. These early efforts were followed by the polychromatic temples of ancient Egypt and Greece, and the structures of multi-coloured marble of ancient Rome. Throughout these eras, and wherever you looked, colour was on the agenda.

It has played a starring role in the stained glass of medieval churches, and on the frescoed ceilings and walls of the Italian Renaissance. And it has been integral to the bright and shiny surfaces of the late 20th and 21st Centuries, including the cube entrance to the Pompidou Centre, Malaga by Daniel Buren (pictured above), a symphony of colour and light.

Colour is "the crucial ingredient that elevates a building to otherwise unachievable heights of resonance and delight," according to designer Adam Nathaniel Furman and author Kate Mazade, in Chromatic Architecture – the Crafts of Colour in Design.

Here are eight colourful structures from their new book. These vivid buildings are a call for architects to wield colour with more verve, and for us to open our eyes to what colour can make possible.

1. Sri Ranganatha Swamy Temple, Tamil Nadu, India

The southern state of Tamil Nadu in India is known for its ancient tradition of using colour. Building work of this temple started in the 1st Century AD and continued through multiple dynasties into the late 20th Century. The result is one of the world's largest religious complexes of more than 150 acres.

It's guarded by 21 gateways or gopurams, whose three-dimensional elements are decorated in bright pigments. "This site teems with a hyper-abundance of spiritual life that is made viscerally manifest through the beautiful use of pigments, which act to draw the visitor and worshipper out of the everyday, and into the realm of contemplation and wonder," Furman tells the BBC.

2. Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona, Spain

The look of this 1908 concert hall came to embody the fast-industrialising, wealthy and culturally distinct Spanish region of Catalonia. Designed by Lluís Domènech i Montaner, the architecture mixes influences from Art Nouveau, the Romanesque and the Gothic Revival, alongside Moorish motifs and Valencian traditions.

For Furman, every single aspect of the Palau vibrates with symbolism, and wouldn't be out of place in a fairytale forest. "Every piece of stone, baluster, voussoir, column and column capital, light sconce and handle are saturated in colour and decorative form that breathe life into them as if by magic," he says.

3. Guardian Building, Detroit, Michigan, US

Locals know this 1929 office building by Wirt C Rowlandas as the "Cathedral of Finance". It's also one of the world's most significant Art Deco skyscrapers.

"Rowland used colour in here as a way to showcase the........

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