The slim white tower on this corner is almost entirely window. Count the wall. There's barely any. Thin ribs of white glazed terra cotta run up between enormous sheets of plate glass, and the building reads as a stack of light with a little pottery holding it apart. That's the Reliance Building, it was finished in eighteen ninety-five, and every glass tower you have ever seen anywhere in the world is descended from it.
Before this, a tall building was a wall with holes in it. Stone had to carry the weight, so windows were interruptions you were permitted. The Reliance flipped the arrangement: a riveted steel frame does all the holding-up, the exterior carries nothing at all, and so the outside can be as transparent as the glassmakers can manage. In eighteen ninety-five the glassmakers could manage a lot.
The construction is the part that sounds invented. The building went up in two stages, and the reason is leases. The owner wanted to redevelop, but the tenants on the upper floors of
the old building on this site had years left on their agreements and would not move. The ground-floor leases HAD expired. So in eighteen ninety, they jacked the entire top of the existing building up onto screw jacks — with the tenants still in it, still working — demolished the ground floor out from underneath, and built a new one in its place. People sat at desks above a construction site where
