Walls, Adam;
(2023)
An Astral World: Lighting Imperial London.
Scroope: Cambridge Architecture Journal
(32)
pp. 1-26.
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Abstract
Orientation generally takes place in relation to light, whether it be to the rising sun in the east, the polestar in the north, or shifting constellations across the night sky. Within modern cities, this orientational role has been brought down to earth and situated within artificial suns, moons and stars – in the form of mundane gas and electric lamps – which effectively severed our connection with the night sky. This is what Walter Benjamin called the ‘transformation of the city into an astral world’. 1 In nineteenthcentury London, this new lightscape oriented subjects not only spatially and temporally, but ideologically as well, in a manner conducive to capitalism, imperialism, as well as the ‘normal’ liberal subject or ‘Man’.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | An Astral World: Lighting Imperial London |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/aboutthedepartment/scro... |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Scroope 32 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence. For terms of licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Architecture |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10187548 |
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