Through the Healing Glass

Shaping the Modern Body through Glass Architecture, 1925-35

John Sadar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317562603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'architecture

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, Pilkington Bros. spared no expense as they launched the most costly and sophisticated marketing campaign in their history. Engineering need for "Vita" Glass employed leading-edge market research, evocative photography and vanguard techniques of advertising psychology, accompanied by the claim: "Let in the Health Rays of Daylight Permanently through "Vita" Glass Windows."

This is the story of how, despite the best efforts of two glass companies, the leading marketing firm of the day, and the opinions of leading medical minds, "Vita" Glass failed. However, it epitomised an age of lightness and airiness, sleeping porches, flat roofs and ribbon windows. Moreover, through its remarkable print advertising, it strove to shape the ideal relationship between our buildings and our bodies.

1
The Healthful Ambience of Vitaglass

Light, Glass and the Curative Environment¹

The aluminium blinds shot up, and the sun poured in through the vita-glass, filling the room with beneficent rays.²

In the mid-1920s a physiologist, a glass technologist and a zoo embarked on an exciting new venture which promised to turn buildings into therapeutic devices.³ Their project was to devise an architectural glass which would admit the beneficial, therapeutic ultraviolet spectrum of sunlight into the building; they called their invention Vitaglass. Vitaglass was the first ultraviolet health glass – one of the more curious products to emerge from the 1920s architectural glass industry. What was remarkable about this product was that it enabled the invisible ultraviolet radiation of the sun to be admitted into the building; its refined chemistry promised to let health into the building where ordinary soda-lime glass had blocked it out.

At the time of Vitaglass’s inception, glass was a commodity material that was differentiated and priced only in terms of its dimensions, colours and surface textures.⁴ Vitaglass was revolutionary in transforming a commodity into a trademarked luxury item, and was among the first in a long and continuously developing line of speciality glass products designed for particular performance criteria. Thus, Vitaglass marked the beginning of a shift in thinking about materials, away from categorising them as mere commodities and towards thinking of them as design artifacts. With such developments, materials became products in and of themselves – solutions in search of applications – and began to assume a more important role in a building’s performance. However, Vitaglass was also the timely product of a particular combination of health and environmental concerns and attitudes toward the sun, changing production methods, and an interest in glass as enabling new opportunities for architecture, each of which were ultimately embodied in the glass and its marketing literature, and in the buildings in which it was installed.

Buildings have a long history of being identified with the human body. Insofar as they are discrete and substantial entities buildings are bodies in themselves, but buildings also embody, are shaped by human concerns and

Figure 1.1 Advertisement from Architectural Review (01.1935).

values, and are ambient as they house and structure human life. In these ways, buildings have a direct relationship with our bodies, as they both shape and are shaped by them. Materials also affect and are affected by human concerns. Vitaglass marked a moment in which architectural glass assumed many of the same embodying and ambient characteristics of a building. Vitaglass is further significant in its reliance on advertising to create its market. Given its particular biological effects and health claims, the aim of this advertising was to portray the body in particular ways and make particular suggestions for the ideal body/building relationship. Vitaglass, together with its marketing, was thus a very deliberate project to address and disseminate particular understandings of, and relationships between, bodies and environments. The bodies portrayed and projected by Vitaglass may not be immediately observable, as the transparency of the material itself conceals them. Although these bodies may be physical and be situated in physical environments, they may also be detected in memos and corporate communications, client testimonials, specifications and patents, literature and buildings. They may be representational, but they are also ambient, and evade immediate perception. They are certainly technological, but they are also biologically-reactive. They are socially-constructed, but also socially-shaping. They may be implied by the material, its use, and moreover by its marketing. They may also be inferred by clients and end-users. In this way, they may be said to be latent, awaiting rediscovery. Revealing them serves to illuminate our relationships with our buildings, and the degree to which our buildings and their materials manifest or mask our understandings of our values, priorities and bodies. The following chapters seek to uncover the nature of those bodies and environments.

A Brief History of Ultraviolet Health Glass

The new market created by the manufacture and marketing of the healthful ambience promised by Vitaglass had less in common with window glass than it did with a host of proprietary health products, such as vitamins or cod liver oil. Through its evocative visualising of the invisible properties of ultraviolet light, Vitaglass captured the imagination if not the market, and created an opportunity not only for competitors, but also for today’s tailoring of architectural glass to particular performance characteristics.

Light, Medicine, Health and Glass: From Finsen’s Light Cures to Lamplough’s “Vita” Glass

In the face of widespread death from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza, the still mysterious debilitation of rickets and widespread urban pollution, health was a front-page issue in the 1920s and 1930s. Although in the period between 1850 and 1920 mortality from tuberculosis in England declined by two thirds and was continuing to fall, the disease continued to account for the overwhelming majority of deaths due to illness, and remained the leading cause of death among youths until the end of the Second World War.⁵ Thus, although mortality was declining in real numbers, infectious disease was a dominant concern for the popular media. Special interest groups, such as the New Health Society and the Sunlight League, further amplified this concern. The popular interest in health in England mirrored a longstanding worry with urban air quality that reached back to efforts to curb the burning of coal in London as early as the thirteenth century, and continued until the Great Smog of 1952.⁶

The connection between environment and disease, which had been the basis of urban sanitation movements, received increasing attention into the interwar years, particularly with respect to the sun. Following Dr. Niels Finsen’s triumphant treatment of tuberculosis with exposure to light, further successes in the treatment of tuberculosis and rickets with heliotherapy, such as Dr. Auguste Rollier’s alpine clinic or Dr. Henry Gauvain’s Alton hospital, positioned suntanning as a medical safeguard but also as a culturally desirable activity – a proxy indicator for a healthy body.⁷ On the one hand the biochemical and germicidal qualities of the ultraviolet spectrum of sunlight that underpinned heliotherapy fuelled an already established tendency to associate ill health with dirt and dust, and on the other hand they stimulated research and debate into how those qualities might be brought into atmospherically-polluted, sunlight-deprived cities, whether by bringing the country into the city, bringing the city into the country, remediating urban pollution, creating artificial sunlight through lighting technology, or enabling more sunlight to enter urban housing.⁸

The relation between light and health made an impact as changes in the economic climate and technological possibilities enabled transformations in the glassmaking industry, making the material more affordable and available in larger sizes to meet the demands of shifting sensibilities. Prior to the lifting of the glass excise tax in 1845, the dominant form of glass manufacture in England was the crown glass process, whereby spun discs of glass were then cut into squares.⁹ While it had exceptional brilliance, crown glass was limited by its optical quality and small sizes. Yet it continued to be produced, even as manufacturers were pressured by a demand for larger sizes due to the tax, which favoured the thinner crown glass over the more substantial plate and sheet glasses and gave it a cost advantage.¹⁰ The lifting of the excise tax and import duties in 1845 made the size and optical advantages of blown sheet more cost-effective, whether from British glassmakers or from continental competition, while the unit price of glass dropped by as much as 80%.¹¹ Meanwhile, Britain’s Window Tax, first introduced as a wealth tax in 1696, was removed in 1851. In France the similar Door and Window Tax (contributions des portes et fenétres), introduced in 1798, was only rescinded in 1917.¹² The burden of such taxes, which were levied at a rate per window, was particularly felt among the lower classes, who bricked windows up to lessen the tax burden. While the intent was that these taxes would be levied on property owners, in practice the effect was that in some cases the lower classes lived in rooms without any windows at all.¹³ By the times of their removal, both the Window Tax and the Door and Window Tax had long been widely condemned as taxes on light and air that were detrimental to the health of the population as a whole.¹⁴

As foundational as these developments were, the significant changes came with the arrival of automated glass production in the early twentieth century. Following John H. Lubbers’s (c.1852–1911) development of the automated cylinder process in 1903, the 1910s and 1920s brought mechanised drawn-sheet processes – implemented first by the Belgian Émile Fourcault (1862–1919) and the American Irving Colburn (1861–1917), followed by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company – which made sheets of increased size and optical properties possible. While different in their details, these processes were similar in their reconceptualisation of glass production. Preceding the techniques of blowing and flattening, both Fourcault and Colburn conceived of glass as being drawn in an infinitely long, flat ribbon, which could then be cut to length, cooled and polished. In addition to enabling glass sizes limited only by the practicalities of handling rather than by the limitations of blowing, the shifts from crown to sheet and from blown to drawn effectively moved glassmaking out of the domain of cottage artisans and into industrial production, such that by the early twentieth century glassmaking had become a large, internationally competitive business.

By the interwar years, glass had become the material of choice for architects seeking to both house and give expression to a new society. In response to the growing nineteenth century problems – new building types which reorganised urban space, new materials which displaced crafts with systems, a widening divide between rich and poor brought about by the reorganisation of both capital and society, and the industrial squalor of overcrowding, pollution and poor housing which resulted in the ill health of the population – architects looked to the very forces of industrialisation for possible solutions. In place of pollution, darkness, overcrowding and disease, they sought transparency, lightness, airiness, greenery and hygiene in projects and buildings at a variety of scales, from pavilions to entire cities. For their inspiration they looked back to the conservatory architecture of the nineteenth century, taking Joseph Paxton’s (1803–65) Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a model for a new architecture. The Crystal Palace was a feat of glass technology, utilising mouth-blown cylinder sheets in sizes that were larger than previously produced, and in a volume that was staggering for the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁵ The Crystal Palace was glazed with 300,000 panes of mouth-blown cylinder sheet glass provided by Chance Bros., each ten inches wide by forty-nine inches long, amounting to 900,000 square feet of glass.¹⁶ Considering the year the English excise tax was lifted was the year the Great Exhibition was conceived, and the year the Window Tax was lifted was the year the Exhibition opened, the Crystal Palace was as timely as it was revolutionary. The Crystal Palace’s lightness, transparency, systematic use of standardised components, functional approach in tune with biological imperatives and increased interface with the natural world found appeal among the architects of the early twentieth century, for whom it became a touchstone for a variety of overlapping sensibilities. In its slender and m...