It has been argued that “Capital A” architecture’s position within the industry is being progressively marginalized to smaller and smaller portions of the built environment and maybe even within buildings themselves. This can be attributed to any number of factors, if you believe this to be fact; economy, perceived value, schedule, cost – the suspects are always the same. The stalwart few who refuse to go unheard have found outlets where those factors play less of a role in producing a quality product that our lives deserve.

I actually don’t put much weight in this argument, rather, I think what we (or maybe just me) are seeing is perhaps a maturity, or better yet, an acuity, amongst designers to find where they can have to most significant, and immediate impact in buildings. We’ll call it, for lack of a better term “opportunity”. The distillation of an idea, client enterprise, program, cultural precept, etc, into one moment of a built environment that can be exquisitely controlled and fed to other, less impactful portions of a project is something that designers have begun to recognize as a way of finding architectural agency in a sea of constraints.

Curtain walls have become one major vehicle for the materialization of this notion for a variety of reasons. They offer the best, and sometimes only way of interfacing with the majority of people who come in contact with the building. They are easily consumed as a billboard for a project. They also offer quantifiable data we can point to specifically, relative to energy and performance. By their very nature, they exist in the realm of 2.5D and they offer a means of formal investigation that coincides with academic and technologically driven ideas about surface.

Princeton Architectural Press has a book entitled Contemporary Curtain Wall Architecture which catalogues this unspoken discussion within our profession. In it, each project is documented through detailed drawings, color photography, and insightful descriptions of the aesthetic and technical considerations that make these projects best-case examples of curtain wall technology. The best aspects of the book, in my opinion, are the drawings that provoke as well as demystify what is, for most, the most complex aspect of the project. The descriptions are matter-of-fact, and the book focuses on what we like most: pictures and drawings.

The book is written by Scott Murray, an architect and assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches graduate seminars on innovations in building envelope design.

MS