healthy modernity sun and glass
technology | modern connections by john stanislav sadar
glass chemistry health sun tuberculosis
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The relationship between climate and the building has been a concern since Vitruvius marked it as a public health issue two thousand years ago. Through most of the nineteenth century, traditional western medical theory linked issues of climate with qualities of place and time and, ultimately, the balance of bodily humours. Alongside fundamental shifts in our understandings of disease in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the role of buildings became one of environmental management, producing and maintaining an interior climate distinct from that of the exterior, articulated by Le Corbusier, and later by Reyner Banham. The production of interior weather has been a particular fixation of the past two centuries, since the first successes with mechanical heating and ventilation systems. Artificial cooling, humidity control and illumination have all been further elaborations of a drive to develop the ideal interior climate, continually evolving with shifting values and understanding. The interest has been in buildings which would simultaneously admit, repel, augment and diminish natural forces to create an ideal indoor climate. By the 1930s, this burgeoning scientific approach dovetailed with the Victorian veneration of the natural world giving us the ideal of a building interior that would equal and even surpass the climate provided by the natural world.
The creation of artificial weather was not limited to the introduction of building equipment, but was also evident in the organisation of the building’s surfaces. Residual Victorian practices coexisted with the ascendancy of scientific rationality. When Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch revealed an invisible microbiological basis for disease, nineteenth century environmental remedies took on a new urgency. [fig. 1] Florence Nightingale pointed to visible attributes of the environment such as dust and debris as harbingers of microbes. This influenced the reduction of ornament and the privileging of hard, polishable surfaces, particularly glass. In addition to revealing dirt and dust, the large expanses of glass that characterised buildings between WWI and WWII demonstrated a particular understanding of the building and human bodies vis-à-vis the sun. With solar radiation linked to the eradication of microbes and to the treating of rickets, the sun became a curative, a preventative and a restorative re-connecting the body and the natural world. The suntanned, athletically-sculpted body became the modern image of the healthy body; size, muscular development and colour became hallmarks of the outward sign of health. More and larger windows were like the toned and tanned body in that they became the outward indicators of the healthy building.
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On Site review 21: stormy weather
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