curtain wall
A curtain wall is a generic name for a non-load-bearing wall. The wall can be removed as it does not carry any structural load. Materials include metal panels, plate glass, or glass blocks. The development of curtain walls has facilitated the glass facades of modern buildings.
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Texts From Articles (45)
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01│Antoni Gaudí: A “Sensible Architect”
… avenue façade was refashioned with a large glass curtain wall. What I would like you to focus on here are the series of small ventilation slits incorporated along the bottom of the windows. Describab…
11 Dec 2024
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The Ingot Coffee Shop: Building as a Mass of Glass
…ate 1960s saw the emergence of two-sided SSG9 for curtain walls, and in 1971, the world’s-first instance of four-sided SSG10, where even the weight of the glass is carried by the silicone sealant, was…
04 Oct 2024
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Windows of the Villejuif Temporary School｜Jean Prouvé’s Windows #3
… ,,,360-Degree Glazing Each buildings had a glass curtain wall tilted roughly 10 degrees inwards on its south face and a vertical glass curtain wall on its north face. The east and west faces were als…
28 Mar 2024
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A Conversation with François Charbonnet (Made in)
Made in is a highly acclaimed architecture firm that was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2003. François Charbonnet, one of its co-principals, formerly taught as a visiting professor at ETH Zurich a…
25 Jan 2024
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Windows of the Aichi University of the Artsby Junzo Yoshimura and Akio Okumura:The Concrete Science of Living with Nature
The Aichi University of the Arts was built to the designs of Junzo Yoshimura and Akio Okumura in 1966. Situated in the forested hills of Nagakute, Aichi, the campus was planned with consideration of e…
19 Jan 2024
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The Prince Karuizawa: The Materiality of Kiyoshi Seike’s Windows
The New Karuizawa Prince Hotel (now The Prince Karuizawa) built in 1982 was designed by Kiyoshi Seike. Seike is known as the architect of a number of Prince hotels locations, with Karuizawa being the …
12 Oct 2023
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The Experimental Design of the KATONO House in Sapporo
…9) incorporated new building technologies such as curtain walls structured by a weathering frame, multi-layered windows, and a copper-pipe floor heating system, and fused them with vernacular design e…
12 Apr 2023
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Screen Time
Screens are everywhere: stadiums, stations, billboards, buildings, refrigerators, thermostats, on our wrists, and in our hands. As a physical interface and virtual portal, screens are also the digital…
25 Jan 2023
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Conversation with EMI Architekten
Ron Edelaar, Elli Mosayebi, and Christian Inderbitzin founded EMI Architekten in Zurich in 2005. The office has developed a particular focus on housing and urban design in Switzerland through numerous…
15 Dec 2022
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Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Windows in New Mexico
At age 62, after living between New York City and New Mexico for many years, artist Georgia O’Keeffe made rural Northern New Mexico her permanent home. There, she lived between two adobe homes well in…
24 Jun 2022
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Issue 4: The Matsu Islands: Small Windows on the Frontier (Part 1)
…ecture of Matsu’s villages evolved. I doubt curtain walls will become an established part of this island with its strong winds, though. Continue walking through the villages and you’ll fi…
25 May 2022
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Terunobu Fujimori｜001: The Advent of Magical Light-Transmitting Surfaces, Glass Doors of the Hirano Residence
In this series, architectural historian and architect Terunobu Fujimori, who has traveled extensively to study buildings of various times and places, will be introducing a selection of notably intrigu…
09 Dec 2021
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Windows of the Prouvé House｜Jean Prouvé’s Windows #2
…e room’s 2.8-meter-tall by eight-meter-long glass curtain wall is one of the largest windows in the house, and it has been meticulously cleared of any structural elements that might obstruct the view …
22 Oct 2021
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Four Tectonic Features that Reside Within Prouvé’s Window Details
…ally the world’s first industrially prefabricated curtain wall systems ever implemented. I wrote “essentially the world’s first” because there are earlier examples, such as those of Walter Gropius’ Ba…
04 Aug 2021
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A Conversation with Peter Märkli
Peter Märkli, one of Switzerland’s leading architects, started his career after meeting his mentor, the architect Rudolf Olgiati. In 1978 he established his own studio, Studio Märkli, in Zurich. Since…
17 May 2021
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An Interview with Richard McGuire, the author of Here: Everything is Transitory
Here is a graphic novel spanning more than 300 pages that allows readers to experience millions of years of time while observing a single corner of a room. Since its first publication in 2014, the wor…
26 Jan 2021
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Shizuka Yokomizo｜Today/Yesterday #1
Today/Yesterday is a series of columns written by London-based artist Shizuka Yokomizo. She weaves together photographs and text to show us what she observes through her windows as the everyday gentl…
14 Jan 2021
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Nature Behind a Curtain Wall
…closer and tried peeking through the glass of the curtain wall to see inside. Tokyo, its trees and buildings, were reflected back at me. And beyond that, inside the building you could just make out th…
02 Sep 2020
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A Conversation with Gigon / Guyer
…hinnest façade construction we’ve ever designed—a curtain wall of glass that is in itself highly efficient, with three layers consisting of five glass panes and different coatings that also work as su…
17 Jun 2020
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The Architecture of the Window
In addition to his design practice, the architect Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani has also cultivated a unique philosophical approach to the fields of architectural theory and history through his writings…
07 May 2020
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Chiharu Shiota The Sense of Daily Life and Smells Soaked into Windows Gives Power to My Work
Chiharu Shiota is an ever-active Berlin-based artist. In works such as her large-scale installations that tie spaces together with massive amounts of threads, she has used clothes, beds, suitcases, an…
15 Oct 2019
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Chapter 2: The frame – the window as optical device or trompe l’oeil from Mantegna to Ryan Gander
Whether facing outwards to the world or inwards to the self, an artist is often restrained by the framing device of the window—unable to break free from a rectilinear box or blank surface that demands…
03 Feb 2020
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The Bauhaus and Its Influence in Japan
…shot illustrates well the way the non-loadbearing curtain wall attaches to the concrete structure and the way the building extends out horizontally. However, if you look at Yamawaki’s photograph, you …
09 Jul 2021
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Windows: Openings and devices
Laurent Stalder, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), has researched various threshold devices in architecture, and published about the topic under the title “Thr…
12 Dec 2018
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America (2)
French and German Traditions The French who had settled Quebec to trade fur descended south along the Mississippi River and founded New Orleans in Louisiana, while Germans in Pennsylvania settled area…
28 Feb 2017
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Part 3 Shokatei at Katsura Imperial Villa
Members of the Imperial Family were the first to enjoy the luxury of tea, a valuable item at that time, before the art of the tea ceremony was established by Rikyu. They built tearooms called kizoku-g…
03 Oct 2018
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Spaces In Between
Korean artist Do Ho Suh, who is perhaps best known for his translucent fabric recreations of real buildings, has continued to explore the relationship between existence and space through his work. In …
01 Oct 2018
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Part 5: To China International Window City!
… homepage, it is Asia’s largest door, window, and curtain wall industry exhibition and trade center. It is a massive institution with a general use space in which companies from all over the world set…
22 Aug 2018
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The Window is the Difference between the Life and Death of a Space
…hange. I’m interested in the new possibilities of curtain walls, for example. The curtain wall doesn’t need to be flat anymore. I have become interested in how you integrate the problem of windows or …
11 Oct 2016
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Architectural Intention behind Technology
…-14, we actually started with a more conventional curtain wall. The first version of that building was, in a sense, more in line with a typical Dubai building. We had a very complex form outside and t…
27 Sep 2016
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Windows as Connectors between the Inside and Outside
Architect Ryue Nishizawa has designed a wide variety of projects, including houses, a church, a station square, and art museums. He has also found international success through SANAA, a practice that …
06 Sep 2016
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How Technology Changes the Future of Windows
Nader Tehrani is an Iranian-American designer who has completed numerous architectural projects worldwide. Having served as the Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT from 2010 to 2014, he is n…
06 Sep 2016
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“Why is This Guy Asking Me to Think about the U-value and the Leakage?”
…self-reflecting, so if you go out and work with a curtain wall manufacturer and you work in practice, you realize that when you are called in to make a building, nobody wants you to reinvent the shopp…
06 Sep 2016
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The Overhanging Village : Kinnaur District, India, Part 1
…al wall is light and surrounded by planks, like a curtain wall. Both the tower’s roof as well as the roofs of the surrounding rooms are made entirely of slate. ,,While the old homes I visited in…
14 Mar 2018
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Boundary Window
…e façade appeared to be a cut-out building with a curtain wall system. Its scale was hard to understand in the trimmed picture. The significant incongruity, or a jump, was felt brilliant to me. Meanwh…
27 May 2016
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la fenêtre à la française
Six years have passed since I arrived in Paris. Although my daily life has been changing and evolving every moment, Paris has kept the skyline since it has been built. The scenery of the small windows…
17 Sep 2015
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Part 2: Apertures for View
Apertures have many purposes of uses. They are used as light sources, as ventilation, and as portals through which people pass. In each of these examples, they are opened to allow some physical thing …
18 Oct 2017
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Shizuka Yokomizo + Takashi Homma The Origin of the Idea
One of artist Shizuka Yokomizo’s emblematic works is her Stranger series, in which she has used photography to capture the distance between herself and others across windows. The artist’s personal exp…
26 Sep 2016
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Part 1: Apertures for Light
Fleeting and weak though it is, light in Scandinavia has a mysterious kind of allure to it. Could it not be that the peoples of Scandinavia worship the light of the sun precisely because it fades so e…
20 Sep 2017
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Terunobu Fujimori “Holes”
Terunobu Fujimori has been producing highly original architecture that makes use of nature, such as wood, soil, and plants, as exemplified in his works including the Flying Mud Boat, Grass Roof, and M…
15 Jun 2021
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Giving Color to Windows
Textile coordinator/designer Yoko Ando has been directing how textiles are used around windows in the work of many architects both young and old. Spaces can be enriched by adding color to their window…
18 Mar 2015
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Cats, Fashion, and Windows
Madoka Hattori is the director of ilove.cat, an online magazine themed on cats and creators, and a freelance editor for honeyee.com and .fatale, two prominent online fashion magazines that define Toky…
25 Nov 2014
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Part 3: The Widely Variant Windows of Modern Chinese Architecture
…ows of different sizes bored into the walls, or a curtain wall with concrete louvers stretched over them, or wooden double doors that open out into the courtyard. ,,,,The exceptional degree of freedom…
08 Mar 2018
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Hiroshi Nakamura Windows and Affection
The following interview was held with architect Hiroshi Nakamura, who has been gaining recognition for the numerous projects that he has designed with the theme of creating a sense of affection. We as…
19 Aug 2013
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Window and Sharing (First Half)
Interviewed are now widely noted architects, Yuri Naruse and Jun Inokuma, who are well known for their project on the theme of “sharing.” The talk is centered on the role and enchantment as well as a …
24 May 2013