This chapter examines the topic of queer visual pleasure and sense experience – particularly sight, sound and touch – in the domestic interiors and home studios of a group of gay photographers in New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It analyses the production and circulation of photographic portraits, particularly nude photographs of Black and White men, by Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes and Max Ewing, and the interiors in which these photographs were produced, displayed, examined and discussed. In addition to the living rooms, studios and closets where photos were displayed on walls and in albums that were passed around, examined and narrativized through speech, the chapter looks at the speakeasies, clubs, gyms and open-air workout spaces in Manhattan, Coney Island and Harlem where male dancers, bodybuilders and athletes gathered, with a particular focus on the display of the male body. Finally, the chapter proposes a new critical category, the queer sensorium, in which looking at, talking about and touching images of nude young men intensified experiences of sight.
This chapter demonstrates that the expansion of spectacle manufacture and changing features of spectacle design had a decisive influence on medical practitioners’ inability to assert control. As a result of mass manufacture and a more uniform, well-fitting frame, the accessibility and functionality of spectacles reached wide acceptance. The chapter investigates how the scale of spectacle manufacture and dispensing was an obstacle in the way of medical attempts to encroach on and monopolise vision testing and spectacle dispensing. This, I suggest, complicates medical definitions of normalcy, abnormalcy and disease and challenges the parameters devised by medical practitioners in the 1850s. This chapter draws heavily upon material culture and explores the specificities of design to highlight how manufacture developed and how certain design features – particularly the spectacle frame’s side-arms – enhanced frames’ overall usability. It argues that medical definitions of ‘normalcy’/‘abnormalcy’ were too simplistic and failed to capture the diversity of visual capacity in Victorian Britain. Indeed, the scale of spectacle manufacture affected medical practitioners’ ability to claim and exert their area of expertise. Here, the chapter teases out some of the peculiarities of visual aids, and their adaptability for mass manufacture, in comparison to other forms of assistive devices and prostheses.
The conclusion draws together the thread of technology and medical intervention woven through each chapter. It examines how technology mediated the Victorian experience of seeing, both by determining the parameters of ‘sight’ and by subverting medical categories and control. It looks forward to demonstrate how the blurred boundaries between different expertise – medical, optical and experiential – influenced twentieth-century spectacle dispensing until the Optician’s Act 1958, and beyond. It argues that the book’s approach to vision measurement – which shapes bodily capacity – connects recent work in sensory history to growing trends in disability history, which both explain sensory capacity as a varied, contextual and subtle continuum. Assistive technologies let us explore how technology and the environment in which it is used influence how bodily capacity is understood and responded to. The rapid expansion of Victorian industry, urbanisation and medical investigation offers an ideal case study. Medical knowledge and the degree to which it was accepted determined the levels at which certain capabilities were normalised. Concurrently, visual aids alleviated the symptoms of sight loss and in turn recategorised blindness as loss of sight incapable of amelioration through technological means.
After coming to power in 1933, the Nazi party began altering all forms of media into an extension of their propaganda machine. It successfully used sound, sight, taste, touch and smell, as well as space and the conception of time, to infiltrate daily life and the family home. Propagandists insisted German families furnish their homes with simple objects descended from the utilitarian objects of the barn and the barrack. Lavishly illustrated books attached moral values to household objects without any consideration of utility or personal taste. A correct German home was supposedly a sensory experience of family cosiness, with propaganda describing the smell of the coffee beans ground by the daughter, the feel of the wood furniture made by Grandpa from German trees and the smell of father and son’s latest kill cooking on the fire that also kept the family warm. This chapter explores Nazi propaganda relating to the manipulation of the five senses in domestic built environments. It also looks at the relationship of Nazi-approved design to earlier German design movements and traces which rituals and aesthetic philosophies survived into the post-war era.
This chapter examines how understandings of vision and spectacles were divorced from medical knowledge or training and from sites of medical treatment. It draws upon a range of medical texts, opticians’ texts, material culture in the Science Museum’s collections, trade cards and retailers’ advertisements to analyse the prominent, and historic, role of the optician and scientific instrument trade in the dispensing of visual aids. As part of this discussion, it argues that opticians and retailers paid little attention to medical understandings of the eye and that spectacles and the enhancement of vision were marketed in the context of scientific ‘accuracy’ and the overall quality of the glass lenses. It also proposes that medical practitioners often dismissed the use of spectacles and focused on therapeutic treatments to remedy vision because of their training and concerns surrounding professionalism and quality of practice in the emerging speciality of ophthalmology.
This chapter shifts the book’s focus to the experience of wearing Victorian visual aids. It covers this book’s whole period from 1830 to 1904 to investigate how spectacles and eyeglasses refashioned the meanings of blindness and mediated attitudes to partial sight and assistive technology. It draws upon newspapers and periodicals, opticians’ account books, medical case accounts, material culture and photographs to demonstrate that, like other dress accoutrements such as the fan or parasol, visual aids were not a trivial accessory. To wear them was to fashion the face, encompassing more than the simple look of a frame; visual aids performed subtle ideological work and shaped several positive and negative attitudes associated with their use. The chapter argues that perceptions towards, and responses to, spectacles were deeply affected by the gender, age and class of the wearer. Popular responses to visual aids both reinforced and challenged medical definitions of normalcy/abnormalcy and scope for medical practitioners to medicalise or monopolise spectacle dispensing. They were not simply an assistive device; they embodied a diverse range of functions and meanings. The adaptability of frame design to serve users’ needs was vital in enhancing popularity and shaping contemporary understanding of partial sight.
In his famous analysis of the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) identified a contrast between the desensitization of the producer and the sensorial overstimulation of the consumer. At the 1925 Paris exposition, the pyrotechnics of night illuminations and the haptic allure of installations of luxuries crafted in exotic hardwoods or artificial and natural silken textiles activated a similar overexcitement engaging sight, touch, sound, temperature and motion. Amidst this solipsistic feast, counternarratives did, nonetheless, manifest themselves. Deploying a microcosmic lens, this chapter focuses on the material and ideological complexities of metalwork within the regional pavilion created by Victor Prouvé (1858–1943), director of the École des Beaux-Arts of Nancy, his pupils, including his son the architect-designer in metal Jean Prouvé (1901–84), and their commercial partners. Attending to the metal and its microhistory at the 1925 exposition reveals the ethos pedagogy of the École de Nancy, attesting to a leftist, collaborative, sensorial practice expressed through experiential contrasts of illumination and gloom, weight and sustained tactility, which has been largely neglected in assessments of this febrile festival of solipsistic luxury.
Interior design is the result of a range of designed elements being brought together to produce an orchestrated space. Just as the interior spaces that accommodate much of our lives are designed, so the sensory experiences we have in those spaces are also designed, whether by professionals or by householders. Some interiors are put together with all of the senses in mind while others prioritise one sense over the rest, for example in appealing to the eye. This chapter examines a variety of ways in which interior designers, mediators and consumers accommodate and stimulate the sense of touch. Landmark examples of designers’ appeal to the hand range from Adolf Loos’ furry bedroom for Lina Loos to the smooth plastic curves favoured by Charles and Ray Eames, Verner Panton and, latterly, Karim Rashid, and demonstrated too in the ubiquitous Monobloc chair. By foregrounding touch in design ideation or production, mediation and consumption, this chapter offers an alternative to interior design histories which focus exclusively on eye appeal.
Our worlds and our relations with others are made through the senses. Through the senses we inhabit our environments. Significantly, space is transformed into place through our sensorial experiences. Placemaking refers to the people and things, practices and representations, meanings and values that make space both meaningful and useful. Thinking specifically about the role of the senses in the placemaking processes of the interior, this chapter focuses on the sensation of heat in the early modern Italian home, 1500–1600. Heat is essential for life. Heat is enmeshed in all other sensory experiences: as inhabitants move through the home, the somatic experience of heat is interwoven with seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting. Yet, as this chapter argues, heat as a significant protagonist in the sensual-social dynamics of the home remains largely unexamined. In particular, by focusing on selected examples of fireplaces in the context of prescriptive writings on the home, descriptions of interiors, household inventories, paintings, prints, ceramics and metalwork, the chapter shows how design elements worked in conjunction with the sensorial dimension of fire within both humble and elite early modern Italian interiors to transform the spaces of the home into places marked by the politics of gender and class. The chapter focuses on material from Bologna, which, despite having one of the largest preserved historical centres in Italy with dozens of extant domestic interiors, remains understudied in the literature on the early modern domestic interior. Comparative examples from other Italian cities are also included as supporting evidence.
The description of Henry van der Velde’s 1899 design for a ‘Herrenzimmer’ (‘men’s room’) as a room for concentrated thinking shows that interior design for men was supposed to facilitate thinking, rather than sensing. Actual bodily and sensory experience was relegated and only served to make disembodied (male) thinking possible. The furnishing of the Herrenzimmer was discussed in interior decoration magazines from the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a regular feature around 1900, while the design of bachelor pads became a topic of attention around the First World War. In the market of men’s magazines in Germany, the design of single men’s apartments was a regular feature showing the male consumer how to furnish and decorate a space that would answer to all the needs and the senses of the bachelor. Taking magazines and interior design advice books as its base, this chapter unpacks the relationship between masculinities and interior design by focusing on how the senses are involved in creating a space of ‘maleness’. How does the idea of ‘male’ comfort go together with a specific idea of ‘male’ senses? How does the writing about male interiors reflect current ideas on the senses developed by the turn-of-the-century physiology? What type of interior design is recommended to relax the senses of the bachelor and make him feel at home? How do ‘male’ senses differ from ‘female’ ones and what happens when they meet in the interior?