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.

At the time of its completion in 1971, One Shell Plaza in Houston was the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world. Designed by SOM’s extraordinary collaborators, architect Bruce Graham and engineer Fazlur Khan for the developer Gerald D. Hines, the 50-story skyscraper continued the evolution of Khan’s “tube-in-tube” structure they had pioneered in Chicago in the mid-1960s. Joseph Colaco, who as a young engineer worked directly with Khan on One Shell Plaza and other projects, will discuss the engineering principles and refinements that make this skyscraper so expressive as both form and structure.

Modern Chinese Architecture: 180 Years tells the dramatic story of the transformation of Chinese architecture from a predominantly modular, timber-frame, single-story building system with ceramic tile roofs of anonymous, local craftsmen to skyscrapers designed by internationally acclaimed architects, from temple markets and itinerant peddlers to megamalls, and from open air stages to auditoriums and stadiums with cutting-edge acoustics.

In 1965, the 47-story and 623ft/190m Place Victoria in Montreal’s financial district, also known as the Stock Exchange Tower or Tour de la Bourse, surpassed Chicago’s 1000 Lake Shore Plaza as the world’s tallest concrete skyscraper. Designed and built from 1960-1965 by Italian architect Luigi Moretti and Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, along with a team of professionals based in both Montreal and in Italy, the project brought together expertise from both sides of the Atlantic. In her talk, based on research for her dissertation, Katie Filek will detail the use of concrete in the tower and discuss how the project was the product of highly localized conditions of costs, materials, and labour in Montreal that relied on the specialized knowledge of Montreal-based architects and engineers for its realization.

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.