To the left of the image, small panels of material can be seen stacked upon one another, leaning against a sloping wall, also parallel to the roof. Most of these offcuts were used elsewhere in the construction, some of it to make cupboards and other furniture.
The room’s surfaces, of Douglas fir plywood, would later be covered with a single layer of PVA, two layers of a transparent intumescent treatment and a finishing coat of matt varnish.
In 1957, a collection of essays written over two years by Roland Barthes was published as a book, Mythologies. One of the most enticing of them, entitled Plastic, began with a description of humans waiting ‘in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter’. They were there to watch an oblong machine transforming ‘telluric matter’ into plastic objects for human use.
Plastic is not that fantastic.
Baekeland gave the product its name and he imagined many uses for it. He would combine it with other materials, including cotton, wood and asbestos.
Bakelite was the first plastic to be used widely. Adolf von Baeyer produced it for the first time in 1872. It would not be exploited as a commercially viable product until 1907, when its synthetic components were further developed by Leo Baekeland in New York. It was patented there in 1909 and in many other countries over the following months.
Barthes went on to describe plastic as ‘the first magical substance that consents to be prosaic’. It is this prosaic quality that has made it ubiquitous.
David Grandorge is a photographer and senior lecturer in architecture at London Met. His fee for this column has been donated to support the publication of new and diverse voices in the AJ