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.

Wednesday, March 8, 2017 6:30-8:00 pm

Thomas Leslie Book Talk

Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934

University of Illinois Press, 2013

This history of Chicago's skyscrapers begins in the key period of reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1871 and ends a chapter in 1934 amid the Great Depression that brought construction to a standstill. Thomas Leslie covers these years in his book ​​Chicago Skyscrapers ​, detailing building methods, foundation materials, framing structures, and electric lighting, and other technical innovations. Leslie also considers how the city's infamous political climate contributed to its architecture, as building and zoning codes were often disputed by shifting networks of rivals, labor unions, professional organizations, and municipal bodies.

Thomas Leslie is the Morrill Pickard Chilton Professor in Architecture at Iowa State University, where he researches the integration of building sciences and arts both historically and in contemporary practice. He is the author of​​ Louis I. Kahn: Building Art​​, Building Science (2005) and, with Jason Alread and Robert Whitehead, Design-Tech: Building Science for Architects (2014). A winner of the 2013 Booth Family Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome, he is at work on a study of the buildings of the Italian engineer and architect Pier Luigi Nervi.

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The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.