Upcoming Programs

The Museum’s director, Carol Willis, will offer a gallery tour of The Modern Concrete Skyscraper, which examines the hidden history of concrete in tall buildings. This exhibition reveals why, today, almost all skyscrapers are built of concrete, not steel. Curator’s tours are FREE, but you must book a timed ticket at 3pm on Ticketstripe, through the RSVP button.

The apartment buildings and hotels designed by Emery Roth in the 1920s and 1930s – blue chip buildings such as Park Avenue’s Ritz Tower and the Central Park West landmarks, the Beresford, the San Remo, the Ardsley – have shaped the ideal of residential luxury evoked in the phrase “prewar building.” In this new edition of Emery Roth’s New York Apartment Buildings, architectural historian Andrew Alpern brings together his meticulously researched catalogue raisonné of Roth’s work, illustrated with spectacular new color photography by Kenneth Grant, with a facsimile reproduction of the classic, long out-of-print monograph by Steven Ruttenbaum, Mansions in the Clouds. The volume also contains a foreword by writer and critic Paul Goldberger.

In her new book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, historian Emily Lieb describes the Baltimore suburb of Rosemont, which in the 1950s was a vibrant Black middle-class neighborhood of rowhouses and small businesses. By the end of the decade, Rosemont was effectively destroyed by plans for an expressway that was planned, but never completed. Lieb’s detailed research and analysis clarifies the blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single neighborhood. Her absorbing story of the interwoven tragedies caused by urban renewal and transportation policy and its lasting effects on racial inequalities in housing, education, jobs, and health describes both a local history and a national problem.