Peter Ellis won the commission for Oriel Chambers by competition and completed it in 1864 as evidenced by the building's
inscription A.D. 1864 in the
gable. It comprises of floor space set over five storeys. Ellis maximised the influx of light by employing a grid of
oriel windows, which became the building's defining feature. Initially, it was not well received.
The Builder of 20 January 1866 criticised it:
The plainest brick warehouse in town is infinitely superior as a building to that large agglomeration of protruding plate-glass bubbles in Water Street termed Oriel Chambers. Did we not see this vast abortion – which would be depressing were it not ludicrous – with our own eyes, we should have doubted the possibility of its existence. Where and in what are their beauties supposed to lie? However, the potential of Ellis's design was not lost on all of his contemporaries.
John Wellborn Root studied in Liverpool as a teenaged boy, having been sent there by his father to be safe from the
American Civil War following the
Atlanta campaign in 1864. In all likelihood, he studied the then-brand-new Oriel Chambers and put the lessons learned to good use when he developed into an important architect of the
Chicago School of Architecture, exporting Ellis's ideas across the
Atlantic Ocean. Long rows of
bay windows (of which oriels are a type) characterise some of
Burnham and Root's 1880s American
skyscrapers. More importantly, Oriel Chambers, and Ellis's building at
16 Cook Street in Liverpool, are amongst the precursors of
modernist architecture for another reason. In addition to the extensive use of glass on their
facades, both boast metal-framed glass curtain walls toward the courtyards, which makes them two of the world's first buildings to include this feature. Both buildings rely on H-section iron columns at the perimeter, which support the floors and cladding. Ellis's method for cladding was, however, not adopted by Burnham and Root: their
Monadnock Building of 1891 has its distinctive bay windows still set in load-bearing brickwork. Recognising its modernity, unsurprisingly, the critical assessment of Oriel Chambers was far more favourable in the 20th century.
Nikolaus Pevsner called it "one of the most remarkable buildings of its date in Europe" and in his earlier book,
Pioneers of Modern Design, describes it thus: The delicacy of the ironwork in the plate-glass oriel windows and the curtain walling at the back with the vertical supports retracted yet visible from outside is almost unbelievably ahead of its time. Architect
Adam Caruso described Oriel Chambers as follows: Its membranous windows are almost an expression of the open space of the interior pressing out into the space of the street. ==Today==