science

Glass Age Development Committee

Glass Age Development Committee is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Glass Age Development Committee rather than just read about it. In short: The Glass Age Development Committee was established in 1937 by Pilkington to promote the use of glass as a building material in the United Kingdom. It commissioned designs for many large-scale schemes, none of which were ever built.

Key takeaways

Glass Age Development Committee belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Glass Age Development Committee to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Glass Age Development Committee from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Glass Age Development Committee was established in 1937 by Pilkington to promote the use of glass as a building material in the United Kingdom. It commissioned designs for many large-scale schemes, none of which were ever built. Initially its name was the Glass Age Town Planning Committee. The first committee consisted of the first-generation modern architects Maxwell Fry, Robert Furneaux Jordan, Raymond McGrath, Howard Robertson, George Grey Wornum and F. R. S. Yorke. Each was asked to "suggest solutions to certain problems of town planning in London, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Bournemouth", using "all the structural and decorative resources of the Glass Age, but [to] produce practical schemes that could actually be built. An imaginative use of modern materials, rather than mere romantic fantasy was desired". This being a marketing tool led by Pilkington, most of the problems were as unrealistic as the solutions. The designs followed early CIAM ideals in sweeping away historical areas such as the Strand and Bond Street in London, and Princes Street in Edinburgh, in favour of extrusions of stacked floorplates walled in glass similar to the Miesian skyscrapers of c. 1920. During the 1950s the Committee was formed of Geoffrey Jellicoe, Edward D. Mills and Ove Arup & Partners, and it was joined by other architects for individual projects. The design briefs were for Britain in the year 2000, but realistic in that they were to make use of technology that was already available. Notable schemes included a proposal in 1955 to demolish the entire area of Soho and rebuild it entirely in glass, a 1957 proposal for the replacement of St Giles Circus in London with a 150-foot (46 m) tall glass heliport, and the 1963 "Crystal Span" proposal for the replacement of London's Vauxhall Bridge with a seven-storey glass building straddling the River Thames, which was to have contained a shopping mall, luxury hotel, residential development and a museum to house the modern art collection now housed at Tate Modern. The Glass Age Development Committee is best known for its ambitious 1968 proposal for a glass and concrete offshore city housing 21,000 people, to be anchored off the coast near Great Yarmouth and accessed from the mainland by hovercraft. The development was to have been called Sea City. The structure would have been 4,700 feet (1,400 m) long and 3,300 feet (1,000 m) wide, and would have rested on concrete islands supported by piers. It was intended that the development would have been economically self-sufficient thanks to boatbuilding workshops, fish farming, and the export of fresh water from an onboard desalination plant, while a lagoon in the centre of the development would support a tourist industry based on skin diving and water skiing.

References

`Sea City, A project for the year 2120, The Engineer, vol 225, 4 March 1968, p395

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Glass Age Development Committee

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Glass Age Development Committee claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Glass Age Development Committee before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Glass Age Development Committee ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Glass Age Development Committee

In research: Glass Age Development Committee appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Glass Age Development Committee in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Glass Age Development Committee is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Glass architecture, Glass industry, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Glass Age Development Committee outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Glass Age Development Committee in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Glass Age Development Committee means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Glass Age Development Committee out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Glass Age Development Committee in simple terms?

Why does Glass Age Development Committee matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Glass Age Development Committee?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Glass Age Development Committee.