Lighting the Victorian Art School

The advance of lighting technology is often viewed as analogous to the extension of working hours brought about by the industrial revolution. However, viewing the inexorable advance of illumination in the nineteenth century as a metaphor for societal progress (or ‘the turning of night into day’, literally and figuratively), ignores the fact that both day and night light were commodities of which there was still a limited supply in the smoke-laden skies of the major cities of Britain. The development of an ‘economy’ of light depended on the ability to quantify light accurately. Following the Municipal Corporations Act of 1882 (permitting the development of public schools, hospitals, libraries and museums), the environmental requirements of many building types would be codified for the first time, including for example, the establishment of a transatlantic standard for the lighting of public libraries , and the lighting and provision of fresh air in school classrooms. The art school in particular represented a building type where the functional requirement for plentiful light was paramount. While it would take another half century to overcome the seemingly insurmountable problem of air pollution (beginning with the Clean Air Act in London in 1952), the use of glass and new forms of artificial light in art schools demonstrate a particularly sensitised architectural response to the atmosphere of the Victorian industrial city – and its myriad problems.