Modern Spaces of Electric Light with Sandy Isenstadt

Wed Oct 27 2021 at 06:00 pm to 07:00 pm

Athenaeum of Philadelphia | Philadelphia

The Athenaeum of Philadelphia
Publisher/HostThe Athenaeum of Philadelphia
Modern Spaces of Electric Light with Sandy Isenstadt
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Join us for an evening with the Society of Architectural Historians!
About this Event

Electric light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a streetscape when it was introduced in the late-nineteenth century. It was a new and uniquely modern kind of building material, generating new sorts of spaces that altered and sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. This talk will review several such spaces—from automobile headlights to factory lighting to wartime mandated blackouts—in order to construct an architectural modernism centered on the new perceptual conditions and visual habits that followed widespread electrification.

About Sandy:

Sandy Isenstadt teaches the history of modern architecture at the University of Delaware. He has published essays on postwar reformulations of modernism and American material culture. Spatial perception in the domestic environment is the subject of The Modern American House (2009), winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. He has co-edited Modernism and the Middle East. Politics of the Built Environment (2008), the first book-length treatment of modernism in the Middle East; Cities of Light (2015), the first global overview of urban lighting; and two forthcoming volumes, Elusive Archives and Modelwork: Material Culture and Modeling in the Humanities. His most recent monograph, Electric Light: An Architectural History (2018), examines the novel luminous spaces introduced by electric lighting. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J.

This event is in partnership with the Philadelphia Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 219 South 6th Street, Philadelphia, United States

Tickets

USD 0.00 to USD 10.00

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