Search results
3 Sunlight for the unwashed The greatest show on earth ‘Even on a really fine day,’ Friedrich Engels wrote in 1844, ‘Bolton is a gloomy, unattractive hole.’1 The town into which Lever was born packed 60,000 people into a cluster of straggling streets, dank back alleys and dirty courtyards amidst rashes of factories and warehouses. The stagnant, stinking river Croal, which bisected the town, served as the common sewer. Unadorned chapels and a smattering of similarly uninspired public buildings did little to relieve the eye; only a token display of new, pseudo
4 Sunlight for savages What have the Romans done for us? ‘Lord Leverhulme brought remote and semi-savage communities to a higher spirit of development than they would have reached by their own unaided efforts,’ wrote T. P. O’Connor in his obituary of the Old Man, ‘and made them productive agents for the supplies of the world’s markets.’1 This indeed was Lever’s boast about his efforts in the Belgian Congo and the South Pacific. But: ‘Did he know what it meant to substitute for that innocence of native life his own idea of ordered effort and exploitation
as the quality of space and the direction of sunlight (see, e.g., Weinreich and Montgomery, 2016 ). Architects see their own training as precisely to consider such issues, which are unfortunately often ignored. The humanitarian–architect divide, as I see it, can be crudely characterised by the tendency towards utopian, expensive and unworkable ideas from architects, on the one hand, and slow, limited and unimaginative responses from humanitarians, on
This book is an unorthodox biography of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925), the founder of the Lever Brothers' Sunlight Soap empire. The most frequently recurring comparison during his life and at his death, however, was with Napoleon. What the author finds most fascinating about him is that he unites within one person so many intriguing developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book first sketches out his life, the rise and triumph of his business, and explores his homes, his gardens and his collections. It contains essays on Lever in the context of the history of advertising, of factory paternalism, town planning, the Garden City movement and their ramifications across the twentieth century, and of colonial encounters. Lever had worked hard at opening agencies and selling his soap abroad since 1888. But if import drives proved unsatisfactory, logic dictated that soap should be manufactured and sold locally, both to reduce the price by vaulting tariff barriers on imports and to cater for idiosyncratic local tastes. As D. K. Fieldhouse points out, Lever Brothers was one of the first generation of capitalist concerns to manufacture in a number of countries. The company opened or started building factories in America, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Germany in the late 1890s. It then spread to most western European countries and the other white settler colonies of the empire, as well as more tentatively to Asia and Africa.
Something here even so. Our well dug-in language pitches us as it finds – I tell myself don’t wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense – granted its dark places, the fabled burden; its loops and extraordinary progressions, its mere conundrums forms and rites of discourse; its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight; its earthen genius auditing the spheres. In this closing passage of ‘Discourse: For Stanley Rosen’ 1 I want to dwell on the penultimate line: ‘its bleak littoral
Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain’s fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country from c.1890-1940. Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day: recommended to counter psoriasis and other skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression; closely linked to notions of beauty, happiness and well-being, fuelling tourism to sunny locales abroad and the tanning industry at home; and yet with repeated health warnings that it is a dangerous carcinogen. By analysing archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles and their visual representation of how light acted upon the body, Woloshyn assesses their complicated contribution to the founding of light therapy. Soaking up the rays will appeal to those intrigued by medicine’s visual culture, especially academics and students of the histories of art and visual culture, material cultures, medicine, science and technology, and popular culture.
energy’ (ultraviolet radiation) stored in the body (see epigraph). 4 He advocated both sunbathing and the use of lamps to poor and rich alike in his 1929 book, The Sunlight Cure . As is clear from the first epigraph by Sir Leonard Hill (NIMR), Dane was not alone in encouraging the public. Despite their vastly different credentials, they both perceived ultraviolet radiation as having the capacity to protect the body by
.’9 Lever himself admired Napoleon, and in collecting Napoleonic memorabilia, which he put on display in a special Napoleon Room in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, he invited the comparison. He even bought around the turn of the century for one of his principal residences, Thornton Manor, the twenty-four-seater dining-room table used by the deposed Emperor Napoleon III in his final exile in England, at Camden Place, Chislehurst, and a couple of Napoleon III armchairs.10 With the death of this electrifying coil of energy, this ‘great and overpowering
The release of L’Enfant secret in 1982 marked a turning point in Garrel’s cinema by inaugurating what the film-maker describes as his narrative period. Several allusions establish a direct correlation between the couple at the centre of the film and Garrel and his former partner Nico. The other two feature films of this period, Liberté, la nuit ( 1983 ) and Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights ( 1984 ) 1 as well as the short film Rue Fontaine ( 1984 ), equally draw on aspects of Garrel’s biography. Capturing the tendency towards self
[RIBA], 1933) In May 1928, The Times published a forty-page supplement entitled, ‘Sunlight and Health’, replete with photographs, illustrations, and advertisements. Readers’ eyes were greeted with smiling faces, bronzed skin, and lithe nude and semi-nude figures in open fields and on busy beaches, or indoors under gleaming lamps and shafts of light ( Figs. 1.1 – 1.4 ). These images