Note 451 — CHAPTER 22 THE EARLY WORK OF THE SECOND GENERATION: WALTER GROPIUS, LE CORBUSIER, MIES VAN DER ROHE, AND THE DUTCH

This sort of enclosure has come of late to be called a ‘curtain-wall’. Some of the skyscrapers of the nineties in Chicago, most notably Beman’s Studebaker Building of 1895 and Holabird & Roche’s McClurg Building of 1899, approached it very closely, yet in them the actual supporting piers remained in the façade plane as at the Fagus Factory and thus the ‘curtain’ was interrupted, not continuous horizontally. The first true example of the curtain-wall applied to a large urban structure followed within a few years after the Fagus Factory, and certainly with no influence from it; this is the Hallidie Building in San Francisco, completed by Willis Polk (1867-1924) in 1918 immediately after the First World War. But see p. 238 and Note 9 to Chapter 14 for Oriel Chambers of 1864-5.