Upcoming Programs

The Museum’s director, Carol Willis, will offer a gallery tour of TALL TIMBER: The Future of Cities in Wood, which 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. Curator’s tours are FREE, but you must book a timed ticket at 3pm on Ticketstripe, through the RSVP button.

In The Architecture of Urbanity (Princeton University Press, 2024) leading architect Vishaan Chakrabarti asks, how can housing design be part of the solution to our global problems rather than exacerbate our existing challenges? He argues that “connective design”— a conscious attempt by a designer to forge deeper bonds across society at every scale—can help heal some of our larger social issues like global warming, social and racial division, the geography of rising fascism, and land use battles.

The Museum’s online series The Modern Concrete Skyscraper continues with a look back into the early 20th century with a talk by structural engineer and historian Tyler Sprague on the unique development of concrete skyscrapers in the Pacific Northwest. In the early 1900s, as Seattle grew into a significant urban center for the region, its early high-rises were made of imported structural steel. At the same time, however, advances in reinforced-concrete construction that came about through the increased production of a local, high quality cement in the North Cascades created a low-cost, high-performance building material that Northwest architects and engineers began to apply to high-rise design.

New York City experienced explosive growth between the 1880s and the 1930s, when nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. The new book Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880–1935 (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by historian Alexander Wood offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, “Who built New York, and how?”

In her new book, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, Nicole Gelinas presents a gripping account of how the automobile has failed New York City and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to the city’s post-pandemic recovery. In a history that spans a century, Gelinas outlines how New Yorkers spent the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to adapt its urban density to fit the private automobile, then, in the past fifty years, how advocates have been resisting and reversing those mistakes. Moving beyond the now-standard characterization of “Saint Jane” Jacobs versus the villain Robert Moses, Gelinas looks closely at the planners and protestors that both preceded and followed their actions and advocacy.