‘Zoooooop! Look quickly or you’ll miss it!’: Pella Rolscreens®, Pilkington Insulight Activ™ and Jennifer Bloomer’s disappearing matter

Abstract

Even before new materialism, Jennifer Bloomer’s writing on matter made it possible to rethink materiality in architecture from a feminist perspective. Drawing on this rich body of work, and on my research into the emergence of building products in interwar Britain, I look in detail at the Pella Rolscreen, a retractable fly screen made in a factory in Iowa, which makes an almost silent and invisible appearance in Bloomer’s 1996 essay ‘The Matter of Matter: A Longing for Gravity’. Like so many other commodities aimed at homeowners in the early decades of the twentieth century, Rolscreens were marketed both for their invisibility and for saving labour around the house. Advertising evoked idealised representations of the leisured housewife, but of course, work — like matter — never really disappears. Rolscreens and their many components were made and assembled by a waged labour force which, as it turns out, also included women.