Hallidie Building

The Hallidie Building stands in downtown San Francisco, designed by the architect Willis Polk and completed in 1918 for the University of California, which commissioned it as a commercial office building on land it owned. The building is widely credited as one of the earliest true glass curtain walls in architectural history, its sheet-glass facade hung on a projecting steel frame entirely independent of the structural floors behind it, rather than the glass being set into load-bearing masonry openings as was then standard practice. Polk suspended ornamental cast-iron fire escapes and a decorative iron cornice in front of the glass plane, framing the transparent wall with a layer of applied historical ornament in front of the building's modern structural glass skin. The building takes its name from Andrew Smith Hallidie, the inventor of the San Francisco cable car system, honoring his earlier ownership of the site. Architectural historians regard the Hallidie Building as a direct forerunner of the all-glass curtain wall skyscrapers that would not become common until decades later.