I watched The Hateful Eight last night, a masochistic exercise of tedium crossed with ultraviolence alleviated by Samuel Jackson's charisma and Kurt Russell's comic bluster.
The takeaway? How glass has transformed our lives.
What lingered was how the six-horse stagecoach had no glass in the windows.
It's winter! In a blizzard! Aren't they super-duper cold????
Now, it's a movie. We need to see the faces of Kurt Russell and whatsername with the black eye because they're being paid millions to be in it. They likely didn't ride around like that in the Real Old West. They probably at least lowered curtains (shown rolled up in the movie).
Or maybe they did leave the shades up. I dunno. I wasn't there.
But they sure as heck didn't have glass windows in those carriages, or heated interiors, such that they could in comfort watch the mountains glide by. Glass was, once upon a time, a whole lot less common than it is now.
Now, I'm no expert, and I'm not going to pretend to write Glass: A History of the First 5000 Years. Such a book might exist, and if it did, I'd at least skim the thing for the cocktail party high points. Fascinating material glass.
To the modern architect, they are The Material. Light! Lightness! Transparency! Blurring the boundary between inside and outside! More choice adjectives! All the good ones apply to glass!
Glass keeps the outside air out, and the inside air in. It keeps the bugs out and the dogs in. It keeps the sound out. It keeps the smells and tastes of the natural world out. But it lets the light in. The light. And so windows frame the outside world into a TV-like realm of vision isolated from all our other senses. Glass allows us to experience the world with just our sense of sight, our other senses disengaged and coddled by the the interior environment over which we have some control. This capacity to experience without risk is a curious property of glass. It changes the mental calculus of experience in every way.
It makes me wonder how glass has changed us. I have always lived and worked in buildings (and vehicles) with glass windows. I've always been able to see outside from the relative comfort of inside. Had I lived in the old West, I might have only experienced environments enclosed in glass windows when I visited big cities or banks. What would my understanding of inside v. outside be in world without glass?
Next time I go camping, I'll ask that question.
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