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The healthful ambience of Vitaglass: light, glass and the curative environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

John Sadar
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Carlton, VIC 3010, Australiasadarj@unimelb.edu.au

Extract

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]..

Type
materials
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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