Philadelphia Chapter, Society of Architectural Historians
and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia present
MODERN SPACES OF ELECTRIC LIGHT
by Sandy Isenstadt, Professor and Chair, History of Modern Architecture, University of Delaware and author of Electric Light: An Architectural History (MIT Press 2018)
Wednesday, October 27 at 6:00 p.m.

This will be an in-person event at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 219 S. 6th Street.

Free for Phila SAH members & Athenaeum members, $10 all others
Preregistration required at
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/modern-spaces-of-electric-light-with-sandy-isenstadt-tickets-168334654483

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.