1st Edition

Through the Healing Glass Shaping the Modern Body through Glass Architecture, 1925-35

By John Sadar Copyright 2016
248 Pages
by Routledge

248 Pages
by Routledge

248 Pages
by Routledge

In the mid-1920s a physiologist, a glass chemist, and a zoo embarked on a project which promised to turn buildings into medical instruments. The advanced chemistry of "Vita" Glass mobilised theories of light and medicine, health practices and glassmaking technology to compress an entire epoch’s hopes for a healthy life into a glass sheet – yet it did so invisibly. To communicate its advantage,... Read more

1. The Healthful Ambience of Vitaglass: Light, Glass and the Curative Environment,  Part I: Environments,  2. The Scientific Evaluation of Light, from Newton to Ritter to Maxwell3. Revolutions in Glass4. Specific Definitions and Visualisations of Disease,  5. Towards a Curative EnvironmentPart II: Bodies,  6. Needy Bodies: Fleetwood Pritchard and the "Vita" Glass Marketing Board,  7. Magical Bodies: The Promise of Weather Control, Labour-savings, Transparency,  8.Normal Bodies: Scientific Management, Ideal Childhood, and Biological Processes,  9. Short-Lived Bodies: The Lifespan of the Therapeutic Environments of the 1920s and 1930s,  10. Shaping Bodies: Marketing Material Performance

Biography

John Stanislav Sadar is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Monash University, Australia, and a partner of Little Wonder design studio. Having studied architecture at McGill University, Aalto University and the University of Pennsylvania, he is interested in the way our technological artefacts mediate the relationship between our bodies and the environment.