Above, another photo of the construction of the B. Altman department store, in this case the original building in 1906. Altman’s, the store, is now gone; the building is now mostly City University’s graduate center.
This photo shows two different ways you can interpret the early interaction between steel framing and building architecture. Option 1: form should follow function. The steel frame seen in 1906 (and barely glimpsed since) represented a triumph of new technology but was hidden within the heavy masonry classical facades. Option 2: form should follow desire. The freedom in design that steel framing provided (walls did not have to stay in plane to provide structural load paths!) could be used however an architect wanted.
We’re looking at a side facade – the 34th Street (south) side of a building facing Fifth Avenue. The avenue facade did not include the southern corner of the block, where the brownstone to the left of the new building can be seen, until a few years after the store had opened, when it was expanded to include the missing corner. A few years after that, the store was expanded to the east, taking over the site of the stable-turned-garage used by Argus Motor Cars, the stable next to it, the building on the far right of the photo, and a few others along Madison Avenue.
So, for option 1, we’ve got the 3D cartesian grid of steel providing open interior space for a very large store, extendable (and eventually extended), and without structural concerns creating a hierarchy that the architectural design would have to work with. The masonry that’s been built as the (temporary) east wall, adjacent to the two stables, is not load bearing and is unornamented, showing how little brick was needed compared to the massive bearing walls of only a few years earlier. Similarly, the lot-line walls facing south and east, visible above Argus, are very plain and clearly curtain walls. But all this clear logic is soured by the beginnings of the very heavy decorative masonry of the street facade.
For option 2, we’ve got the use of the ordinary roof beams cantilevered over the spandrel girder to act as cornice supports, and the fact that spandrel beams could carry the ornate steel facades and plain side walls equally well, based on the architectural design. “Curtain wall” is a functional description, meaning a wall that serves as enclosure but is not structural. It can be heavy masonry, thin masonry, metal panels, glass, or any number of other materials. The use of that phrase to mean “glass-walled” is an unfortunate over-simplification both of the past and of future possibilities.
