ORCID Profile
0000-0003-4791-9551
Current Organisation
Swinburne University of Technology
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 12-2008
DOI: 10.1017/S1359135508001206
Abstract: 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. 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 ray glass – one of the more curious products to emerge from the 1920s architectural glass industry. Its distinguishing feature 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 [1]..
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-05-2015
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-05-2014
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2019
Publisher: Universitas Indonesia, Directorate of Research and Public Service
Date: 27-02-2018
DOI: 10.7454/IN.V1I1.8
Abstract: In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, Reyner Banham presents a parable in which, having come across an amount of wood, a nomadic tribe must decide how to use it to keep warm overnight: build a structure or build a fire (and burn the wood as fuel). The first of these uses the materials directly to create an amenable interior condition using the tangible materiality of geometric construction. The second, however, generates heat from combustion, thereby creating an intangible, graduated, thermal interiority, which one can draw deeper into, by moving closer to the fire, or recede from, by moving away. Interior architecture has largely been concerned with achieving shelter and creating an interior atmosphere through the dependability and predictability of physical materials. Less often has interior architecture considered the interiority achieved through the temporal contingency of atmospheric quasi-materials (taking a cue from Tonino Griffero’s quasithings), phenomena such as light, sound, temperature, and humidity. While these often strike one as outside of the realm of designers, their effects profoundly colour our experiences of our environments: the smells of street food, the heat of the metro air exhaust, the veil of fog rolling in. A selection of student projects probing quasi-materials in interior architecture reveals their nature and potential for making interior environments. More akin to building a fire than fitting out a shell, these projects question existing tenets of interior architecture, while they enable types of interiority that are fluid, graduated and temporal.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-09-2015
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Date: 2012
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 15-07-2016
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 23-06-2023
DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780190922467-0088
Abstract: Glass is paradoxical. Glass is prized for its permeability to light. Its material qualities of reflection and refraction that gift it the spectacular quality of being seen to not only transmit light but contain it, enabling the splendor of the chandelier and the dizzying nightscapes of the city. Although visually light, it is as dense as concrete. Glass is simultaneously valued for its imperviousness and inertness, making it a valued container, particularly for perfumes and chemicals. Despite its density and hardness, it is painfully fragile, requiring careful handling. Into the seventeenth century, the secrets of glassmaking were closely guarded, protected even to the death by Venetian glassmakers. It was a luxury and taxed as such, with Britain’s Window Tax introduced in 1696 and not lifted until 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. France’s Door and Window Tax was not rescinded until 1917, amidst the Great War. Glass is thus more than a material it is an ideal. Glass is central to the relationship between our bodies and environments. Because it can transmit energy flows, glass holds the promise of a programmable, ecological material, which might enable us to restore a sense of balance with the world (despite the energy required for its production). Its relationship to optics and lenses links it with rationality and the Enlightenment. Through its inertness, glass exudes hygiene. As the chief intermediary between our bodies and the natural world, glass radiates our ideal of health. Transparency has itself become an ideal whether in the operations of the state or corporation, or the conduct of an in idual: lucid expressions, clear thoughts, illuminated society. At the same time, as any Gothic cathedral reveals, glass’s visual immateriality lends it a magical, mystical dimension. Successive changes in production have transformed glass into a commodity, ever larger, cheaper, and more programmable. When the Crystal Palace was constructed in 1851, it was comprised of nearly 300,000 panes, mouthblown by skilled and specialized artisans. Successive waves of reconceptualizing glassmaking in the twentieth century increased sheet sizes and lowered costs—from the Lubbers process of mechanized cylinder glass to the Colburn and Fourcault processes of drawn sheet to the Pilkington process of float glass. In the early twenty-first century, glass production is dominated by multinational companies with annual sales worth more than one hundred billion dollars. We have come to expect a great deal of the material. We expect it to connect us with our surroundings, yet also to protect and define our inner world. The choices facing early-21st-century architects regarding glass selection range from light transmission, to heat absorption, to sound transmission, to shock resistance, to load-bearing capacity. These variations, which may employ altered chemistry, surface treatments, and laminations, each strive to realize our changing notions of the ideal ambience. For all of these reasons, Michael Wigginton perhaps put it best when he wrote that glass is an impossible material. Glass is a dream.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2012
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2023
Publisher: ACM
Date: 19-10-2011
Location: United States of America
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for John Sadar.