Concrete, steel and structural glass are the three core elements of the vast majority of modern buildings, and as the latter becomes increasingly sophisticated in its construction and its use, the more it is adopted by businesses to make their offices shine bright on the inside and outside.

Whilst most commonly associated with modernist office blocks from the 1930s and onward, curtain walling has been used for at least half a century before this, and whilst it is generally admired and adored now, this was far from always the case.

One of the greatest illustrations of this was Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, which was the first building to feature a glass curtain wall with metal framing.

Designed by Peter Ellis and constructed in 1864, Oriel Chambers is a striking landmark that was completely at odds with the conventions of Victorian architecture, one that had only just started to see the aesthetic power of brighter, open spaces after the repeal of the Window Tax a decade prior.

Whilst not a skyscraper by modern definitions, it has since been seen as the first modernist building, and in retrospect has been acclaimed for just how forward-thinking its design was.

However, at the time, this was far from a majority view, and one of the oldest business-to-business construction magazines in Great Britain, The Builder, infamously described it as worse than “the plainest brick warehouse”.

The review of the building, published in a 20th January 1866 edition of the magazine, was brutal, describing it as “depressing were it not ludicrous”, an “agglomeration” and a building that they would have doubted would have even existed had the writer of the piece not seen it.

Much of this criticism seems somewhat shocking in hindsight, but this somewhat conservative architectural worldview was not shared by everyone.

John Wellborn Root, a pivotal member of the Chicago School of Architecture, brought curtain walling to an even bigger stage in the United States, and as the skyscraper figuratively and literally dominated architectural discussions, Peter Ellis’ progenitor has been heralded as the start of it all.