Honoring three decades of design excellence in New England! 🥂✨

We are thrilled to be featured throughout the 30th Anniversary Edition of the Boston Design Guide.

Congratulations to Melanie Perillo and a huge thank you to Lisa Fabiano and the entire BDG team for 30 incredible years of highlighting the region’s finest architecture, design, and craftsmanship—and for being such an outstanding media partner to SBS OneSource.

Flip through the latest issue to see our feature highlighting world-class architectural window and door solutions, from Loewen, panoramah! and more:

If the horizontal sliding window was relatively little used in Western architecture up to then, sliding elements are a constant of Traditional Japanese Architecture.

In fact, the Japanese timber post-and-beam system provides great freedom for the organisation and relationship of spaces, enhanced by the use of partitions made up of removable sliding panels. As a consequence the various interior compartments easily become a large undifferentiated and fluid space. Their application in the outer perimeter, on the other hand, allows the façade to open promoting a fusion between interior and exterior. The use of sliding panels composed of a wooden structure – shōji and fusuma³⁴ – whose filling was made of rice paper or cloth – allowing people to see out when open and only to admit light when closed – became therefore very popular. Glass panes only began to be introduced at the end of the 19th century³⁵.

Frank Lloyd Wright, deeply influenced by Japanese architecture³⁶, became interested in these elements, which he described in his Autobiography.³⁷ In his work he adopted the use of long ribbons of
windows, as early as the Prairie Houses in Chicago (1893-1910), since this layout allowed a great relationship between interior spaces and nature outside. This architectural approach, then uncommon in Europe, was especially well received in Southern California because of its particularly temperate weather. In fact, glazing was still a long way from providing a suitable thermal response, so it was mild climate that opened the way to the “picture windows” and “glass walls” of ranch houses.³⁸

It was also in California that, from 1919, Wright designed and built a series of houses with courtyards, large glazed surfaces and mitred glass windows. Although Wright did not favour sliding solutions –
preferring the coplanarity of casement windows – the same was not true for his Viennese collaborator Rudolph M. Schindler. Indeed, since his very first works, Schindler made an extensive use of sliding
glass doors.³⁹ At Kings Road House in West Hollywood (California, 1921-22), he adopted a single-story structure with a direct relationship with the exterior through sliding patio doors composed of a timber frame filled with glass or canvas.

Sliding doors at Schindler’s residence in West Hollywood (1921-22).
Originally the sliding frames were filled with canvas.
Above: Photo by Julius Shulman, 1953.
Below: Photo by Julius Shulman, 1991.
© J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10).