The Skyscraper Museum
GARDEN CITY | MEGA CITY: WOHA rethinks.. banner
The Skyscraper Museum

The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.



GARDEN CITY | MEGA CITY

WOHA rethinks cities for the age of global warming

March 23 - September 18, 2016

Click here to view our VIRTUAL EXHIBITION

Click here for PRESS on the exhibition

In the tropical countries and islands of Southeast Asia and South Asia, nature, sun, and people are abundant. Of the world’s twenty largest megacities – metropolitan areas with a population of 10 million or more – seven are located in these hot and humid regions. Rapid urbanization has been the pattern of growth and accommodating rising densities poses major challenges for governments, planners, and architects – as does the crisis of climate change.

Just one degree latitude north of the equator, the tiny city-state of Singapore, with 5.5 million people and a territory of 278 square miles (719 km2) – slightly smaller than New York’s five boroughs – presents an extraordinary model of social engineering and architectural innovation. In Singapore, where 80 percent of the resident population lives in some form of public housing, of which 90 percent own their homes, the Housing Development Board (HDB) has embraced both the high-rise typology and the goal of a garden city.

WOHA – the practice begun in 1994 by architects Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell – has built extensively in Singapore, as well as in Bangkok, Mumbai, and other megacities in the region. The firm advances skyscrapers as solutions for urban density, but critiques the Western conventions of steel and concrete frames, wrapped and sealed in a curtain wall of glass and artificially cooled. WOHA proposes – and they have built – tropical towers enveloped by nature and vertical villages with sky gardens, breezeways, and elevated parks. At a time when global warming threatens the future, the enlightened work of WOHA rethinks the urban environment, offering prototypes that use vertical density to create highly social, sustainable, and garden-filled cities.

Drone video footage of PARKROYAL on Pickering and Skyville @ Dawson.

         



The exhibitions and 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 exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.