The curtain wall

Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 12 related

1. Story
2. A non-load-bearing external envelope hung on the structural frame, carrying only its own weight and the wind pressure on its face, and transferring both back to the frame at each floor. It is the direct consequence of the skeleton frame: once the wall has no structural job, its thickness is set by weather, insulation and fire rather than by the height of the building above it. Early curtain walls were masonry or terracotta panels; the fully glazed metal-and-glass wall becomes the dominant commercial idiom in the mid-20th century. The trade is real and still unresolved: a glass envelope maximises daylight and view and minimises weight, and it is thermally poor compared with a heavy wall, which is why a large fraction of the operating energy of a mid-century glass tower goes into correcting the envelope with mechanical heating and cooling.
3. Knowledge
4. The steel skeleton frame
5. The curtain wall
6. Connections
7. The steel skeleton frame
8. Load path
9. Structural steel
10. The curtain wall
11. Home Insurance Building, Chicago
12. The Home Insurance Building is completed in Chicago
13. Demolition supplies the evidence for the claim
14. Evidence
15. Jenney's Home Insurance Building (1885) is conventionally identified as the first tall building carried on a metal skeleton frame, and the claim is qualified in the scholarly literature. Supports the frame, elevator and Chicago School records. V55 verification basis: the site was not reachable in this session; entries are cited by title from established record.