Picture This

by Neal Vogel

Spring of 1962 found my parents moving into their brand new three-bedroom ranch house (I arrived a few months later). Out front the house featured a large picture window, about 60" square, flanked by casement windows with oversized diamond panes. From the time I could chin-up on the window stool, until the year we moved out, that living room window presented the best picture of the outside world, the place to watch a summer storm or winter blizzard, to see who was coming home or just driving by. It was also the best view indoors, where seasonal kitsch, from glowing plastic pumpkins to sparkling aluminum Christmas trees, cycled in and out of display.

Picture Prehistory
The ancestors of picture windows date to the mid-19th century and are closely linked to the development of window glass itself. London's Crystal Palace of 1851-the quintessential glass structure of the Industrial Revolution-not only enclosed a world's fair in glass, but also exhibited the largest sheet of plate glass made up to that point. It was no small achievement. Until the 1920s, plate glass used for oversized windows was produced entirely by the casting method. Workers would pour molten glass onto cast-iron casting tables from large regenerative pots, then roll, anneal, grind, and polish the slab into a finished sheet. The process was slow and labor intensive, making plate glass an expensive commodity.

Not surprisingly, plate glass saw very limited residential use in the 1800s. According to Warren Scoville in Revolution in Glass Making, only "Some of the wealthiest people in Boston had begun to use polished plate glass instead of sheet glass in their front windows before 1850." By 1870, plate glass sheets as large as 84" x 60" were possible, but the domestic output was less than one percent. Thanks to American ingenuity (and protective U.S. tariffs) the domestic production of plate glass rose steadily to 82 percent by 1890. In 1897 the Marsh Plate Glass Co. of Floreffe, Pennsylvania, developed a continuous lehr (oven) for annealing plate glass, reducing the carefully controlled cooling time from three days to three hours.

Stylistically, oversized windows grew in popularity in the 1890s and were known as "cottage" or simply "front" windows. Cottage windows invariably featured a transom above and were rarely larger than 48" x 68" (including the transom). Cultural changes in the early 20th century, as well as innovations like central heating, led to flowing, open floor plans and ever-larger windows in the home. The horizontal emphasis of Prairie School architecture, championed by Frank Lloyd Wright, called for wide windows, not tall windows.

While Wright used decorative ribbon windows or art glass in most of his Prairie School houses, more vernacular and eclectic versions incorporated oversized windows of plate glass. To meet the market, sash-and-blind companies promptly rotated their cottage windows on their sides for better architectural proportions. The transom became a casement or double-hung sash paired with a mate for natural ventilation. These new oversized windows, mimicking commercial Chicago windows, were known as "landscape" sash for a spell. The center sash was still rarely larger than 48" square, but the overall window assembly now had a predominately horizontal axis, spanning 8' or even wider.

Gains in Glass
Thanks to Henry Ford, by 1922 engineers had developed a semi-continuous method of rolling plate glass for automobile windshields that was soon adopted by Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. and Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Co. As a result, the price of plate glass plummeted in comparison to the price of standard window glass, and though it remained the costlier material, more affordable plate class contributed to the growing popularity of picture windows. By the 1930s, plate glass 127" x 286" could be produced up to 11/4" thick.

American Window Glass Co. of Pittsburgh offered a plate glass alternative for oversized windows dubbed "Crystal Sheet," a special 39-ounce (per square foot) glass, 3/16" thick. Nevertheless, picture windows were usually glazed with 1/4", 5/16" or 3/8" plate glass, while larger windows required thicker glass for stability.

Chicago's Century of Progress International Exposition of 1933 unveiled George Fred Keck's ultra-modern House of Tomorrow and Crystal House emphasizing the use of glass throughout the home. The term "picture window" was coined a few years later and best captures the role of the oversized window. A solar-home innovator, Keck introduced thermal pane windows in 1935, but thermal pane picture windows are not commonly found on all classes of residential work until the 1960s.

Meanwhile, architectural movements like De Stijl and the International Style were evolving in Europe where picture windows soon morphed into picture walls, better known as glass curtain walls. Large picture windows on Walter Gropius's house (1925) in Dessau, Germany, were the precursors of enormous picture windows that appear on his home (1937) in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Huge sliding windows on Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat house (1930) in Brno, Czechoslovakia, were precursors of glass curtain walls on his Farnsworth House (1950) in Plano, Illinois. Designed in 1946, the Farnsworth House was freely adapted by Philip Johnson for his own glass house (1949) in New Canaan, Connecticut. The glass box proved elegant but lacked privacy. The Farnsworth House was actually designed without eaves, operable windows, or air conditioning, making it an unbearable "hotbox" during five months of the year.
While architectural innovators pushed glass to extremes, mainstream America developed a love affair with sprawling 'burbs and sprawling Ranch houses during the post-World War II boom. Picture windows were increasingly ganged together on back elevations as pseudo curtain walls for everyday houses. The September 1947 cover of Architectural Forum features a New England "solar" house by Carl Koch with three large pictures windows framing a corner. According to the feature story, "the owners were not particularly enthusiastic about contemporary architecture but could not build a Cape Cod to supply the light and air desired." An advertisement in the same issue promotes Anderson Windowall saying "These windows that are walls... these walls that are windows are the perfect expression of a design trend that has been accepted universally by progressive architects and designers."
Well into the 1950s, picture windows even found a home in the pre-industrial-age styling of Colonial and Tudor Revival houses, where they were often employed as the centerpiece of a bay window. The picture window's major role, however, came as a prominent front window hung on the vast majority of houses of the 1960s and 1970s. Today in the 21st century, a growing interest in cathedral ceilings and "great" rooms, along with the availability of more efficient thermal-pane (even triple-pane) windows, has rejuvenated interest in oversized windows and walls of glass. Picture windows are being installed once again-for watching a summer storm, a winter blizzard, or simply to bring in light and nature.

Neal Vogel is a restoration consultant and principal of Restoric, LLC, in Evanston, Ill. (restoric@earthlink.net).

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