What Was The First Building With A Glass Curtain Wall?

If there is a single architectural element that defines the modern cityscape, it is almost certainly the glazed curtain wall and the shimmering glass facades that have served to epitomise modern building design.

Alongside indoor glass partitions and the open plan office, the glass curtain allows for a huge amount of natural light to come into the building and creates a characteristically aesthetically pleasing look, with glass curtain buildings looking sleek, smooth and delicately constructed.

However, whilst associated with 20th-century architectural movements such as Bauhaus, the use of a glass curtain wall is far older than one might expect, and whilst largely beloved in the architectural community now, was far more controversial than one might expect.

A Large Agglomeration

The inventor of the curtain wall was Peter Ellis, an architect and inventor born in Liverpool in 1805, learning the trade from his father.

The elder Peter Ellis was involved in the construction of several courts and housing estates, and from 1824 until he established his own office in 1834, the younger Peter would work with his father on housing design.

Once he had his own office, he had the potential to work on more ambitious projects, but it would take until the 1860s for his biggest contribution to architecture to be constructed.

Based on Water Street, Oriel Chambers was originally designed as a competition entry with the express intention of taking advantage of improved glass construction techniques to create a grid of huge windows, creating what was in effect a curtain wall.

This was made possible through the use of iron columns that allowed for a non-structural facade, a system that was surprisingly forward-thinking.

However, as with so many architectural designs that were ahead of their time, contemporary opinion was not always necessarily kind to it, and there was a surprisingly substantial level of criticism for it.

By far the most savage comments were made by The Builder magazine, who in their January 1866 edition were so aghast at the building’s design they quoted the Shakespeare play Hamlet to express their horror and discontent.

It was described as worse than even the plainest warehouse, a “vast abortion”, and questioned where its beauty was supposed to lie.

Some architects and historians, most notably Quentin Hughes suggested that the criticism was so strong that Mr Ellis moved away from architecture and worked more as a civil engineer during the last years of his working life outside of designing the paternoster lift.

However, this characterisation is contested, not least because he did continue to design buildings and it is possible that the inventive part of his character was more interested in civil engineering work.

As well as this, even at the time his architectural contemporaries could see that his ideas had considerable merit.

John Wellborn Root studied the Oriel Chambers as a child and took its ideas with him to the Chicago School of Architecture, where they would form a critical part of late 19th-century American skyscrapers.

It has since become a Grade I listed building and retrospective examinations of the building are filled with effusive praise for how ahead of its time it looked.