36 CONTEXT 177 : SEPTEMBER 2023 Vitrolite was used in shopfronts and bathrooms initially in an elaborate beaux-arts style. It was only after the art-deco exposition of 1925 that the aesthetic became sleeker. We should remember how innovative glass for building was at the time – an English commentator at that exposition listed ‘glass walls’ as one of the exotic elements on display (along with sharkskin furniture and monkeyskin bedspreads). A New Glass Age was being heralded which saw the potential of glass as an indestructible material. It allowed buildings to be made of steel, which could withstand bombing, then be quickly re-enclosed with glass if bombed. The simultaneous rise of the interior designer exulted in the sensuous appeal of glass block, glass mosaic, mirror glass and so on: witness a bed, in green Vitrolite and chrome, for the Maharajah of Indore, 1930–33. A radical shift happened in shopfront design either side of the first world war. The architectural press decried the large Victorian/ Edwardian shop with its ‘acre-of-glass’ front, favouring the smaller Parisian examples. Shop design became a new specialism, and when architects such as Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry used a Vitrolite shopfront for the Electricity Showrooms, Cannon Street, London, it gained credence for this new glass treatment. The largest collection of designs for Vitrolite was the 1935 competition Modernising Main Street, a call for investment and regeneration, to employ architects and lever downtown America out of decline. It linked floor plans to elevations and fitting details. More generally in the architectural press, before and after photos of makeovers with Vitrolite abounded. Particularly clever were those that retained the existing plate-glass windows, which were a very expensive element of any shopfront. Émigré designer Paul T Frankl stated that ‘Bakelite, aluminium, Monel metal alloy and Vitrolite glass comprised the vernacular of the 20th century’. This pervasiveness lies tantalisingly below the radar of the architectural press and subsequent narratives. In a rare glimpse, the Irish Builder, reviewing the booklet Vitrolite Specifications in 1939, wrote that ‘Vitrolite is now so well-known to the general public, as well as to the architectural professions and cognate trades… in bathrooms, kitchens, hospitals, cloakrooms and lavatories, lounge and cocktail bars, hairdressing salons, shops and cafes, staircases and offices, floor, An advertisement for Vitrolite by the British Vitrolite Company from the Architectural Review in March 1937. Woodhall Garage in Calverley had a primrose Vitrolite front with green Vitrolite stripes and a black Vitrolite plinth.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=