A curtain wall is a non-loadbearing construction made of glass or another flat material.
The English architect and civil engineer Peter Ellis designed the building Oriel Chambers in Liverpool. It was a non-loadbearing façade construction with large windows, fastened to the building's loadbearing reinforced concrete construction. The construction was called a ”curtain wall”, a term which became widespread with American skyscraper architecture in the late 19th century. Curtain walls were developed further by European Modernist architects in the 1920s and '30s.
