Note 466 — CHAPTER 22 THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH

Like Le Corbusier’s window-walls, these horizontal strip-windows, usually called ‘ribbon-windows’ in English, can be traced back at least as far as Shaw’s work of the sixties, though all the intervening links are not yet clearly identified. Their analogy with ‘Chicago windows’ is closest and, indeed, Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie & Scott façades, with their wide windows crisply cut in the smooth terracotta wall-plane, are amazingly premonitory of the characteristic new window-banded façades of the twenties. Before this time window-strips were always subdivided by relatively heavy mullions in the plane of the wall, as in Voysey’s houses, or set behind ranges of colonnettes or other supports, as they were still in the clerestory of Wright’s Unity Church.