The book talks and lectures below are held at The Skyscraper Museum from 6:30-8 pm and are free of charge, except when noted. The gallery and exhibition are open for viewing from 6 pm. To assure admittance, guests must either use the RSVP form on this site or send an email to [email protected] with the name of the program you would like to attend.
Please be aware that reservation priority is given to Members and employees of Corporate Members of The Skyscraper Museum. Not a member? Become a Museum member today!
Book Talks continue to be presented as webinars. Past lectures are posted on our website and YouTube channel for full online access. Curator's tours are held in-person in the gallery.
Celebrate International Museum Day with a guided tour of our exhibition TALL TIMBER: The Future of Cities in Wood! TALL TIMBER examines recent tall buildings in Mass Timber and proposals for its role in a more sustainable, low-carbon future for our cities and our planet. Led by the Museum’s Head of Programs and Operations, Daniel J Borrero, the tour features beautiful models of recent Mass Timber building projects, touchable material samples, and a charred timber column that was put through a rigorous fire test. Guided tours are FREE, but you must book a timed ticket at 3pm on Ticketstripe, through the RSVP button.
In three chic palaces of consumption – Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor, and Henri Bendel – Satow writes, “men owned the buildings, but inside, women ruled.”
Vancouver architect Michael Green is a pioneer of the Mass Timber movement in North America. Since his 2012 publication “The Case for Tall Wood Buildings” and inspiring 2013 TED Talk “Why We Should Build Wooden Skyscrapers,” Green has been a clarion voice in spreading the message of an all-wood architecture that is healthy, affordable, and sustainable.
Tour 1 on June 13 at 4pm, which will be repeated on June 21, explores Battery Park City’s southern district, which is home to the Skyscraper Museum and includes some of BPC’s earliest landscapes and infrastructure, as well as the residential enclaves built in the 1990s that followed the 1979 Cooper Eckstut Master Plan. Starting in the Museum’s gallery to see historic views of the waterfront, the tour will visit South Cove and the green spaces that connect to the Esplanade, the first waterfront park in New York since the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade in 1951.
This tour will meet at The Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Pl.
A decade ago, concerns about energy consumption in the building sector focused on operational carbon – particularly, emissions associated with heating and cooling. Today, though, the discussion has shifted in part to embodied carbon, which can also be called “upfront carbon,” because it is carbon released into the atmosphere before the building even opens its doors. Embodied carbon measures the first-stage “carbon cost” of producing energy-intensive materials such as concrete and steel, of transporting them to the site, and of other processes that require burning fossil fuels used to construct a building.
Tour 2 of the Museum’s three thematic walking tours of Battery Park City on Thursday, July 11 at 4pm will focus on the commercial core with its 1980s skyscrapers of the original World Financial Center (now Brookfield Place) by architect Cesar Pelli, as well as the expansive North Cove Marina and its public realm. This walk will investigate how the planning concept of public-private partnership was both the principle and economic engine of the Battery Park City project and how the goals of opening the waterfront to public access and recreation was realized over three decades.
This tour will meet in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.
The third of the Museum’s three thematic walking tours of Battery Park City, on Thursday, August 8 at 4pm, will cover the north residential neighborhood, which was developed in several phases, beginning with Stuyvesant High School at the northeast edge and the esplanade and Rockefeller Park along the Hudson. A diagonal avenue lined with apartment buildings creates one face of the neighborhood, while the inner courts of the large blocks are connected by the delightful Teardrop Park. Located two blocks from ground zero, we will also explore the history and design of the Irish Hunger Memorial completed in 2001. Tour 3 will be repeated on August 16 at 4pm.
This tour will meet in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.
The programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
The programs of The Skyscraper Museum are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.