The mid-twentieth century had some real weirdnesses in terms of building technology in the US, mostly caused by the combined effects of the Great Depression and World War II. Building construction fell way off from the feverish growth of the 1900s, 10s, and 20s, but it’s not like building technology stopped developing. It had been developing rapidly in numerous subfields – steel framing and window design immediately come to mind and are related to the discussion below – but the new ideas were not necessarily being used in real buildings because of the reduced volume of new-building construction and the conservatism inherent in tough economic times.
When a good peacetime economy returned, in the 1950s, people rushed to use the two decades of new ideas they had stored up. One of them was all-glass curtain walls. Here’s 633 Third Avenue shortly after its 1962 completion:
That curtain wall is nothing special-looking today but it was still a new idea to the public then, less than a decade after New York’s first glass facade had been built. Here’s that wall being built in 1957:
All-glass walls are always a bit fake: no one wants to see, from the outside, the edge of the structural slab and whatever spandrel beam there might be; and most people on the inside tend to feel more secure (particularly in high rises) if there is some solid material near the floors. But neither of those reasons was why that concrete-block kneewall was built behind the opaque glass at the floor. The building was constructed under the 1938 NYC Building Code1 which required masonry in exterior walls for fireproofing. That requirement was under attack in the late 50s and 60s, but remained until 1968. A few individual buildings got around the requirement with special appeals, but the important word in that statement is “few.”
One reason that glass curtain walls took a while to become popular in New York is that, at first, the masonry back-up requirement meant building them was little different from building a traditional wall. Not much savings in time, effort, or cost…until their efforts got the code changed.
- It was revised a number of times between 1938 and 1957, but it was the ’38 code in most regards, just as the code in use in 2007, which was revised in 2007, was the 1968 code. ↩︎
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