Over 35 years of practice, David West has spearheaded the design of over 150 multifamily projects. His lecture will highlight the development of residential high-rise design through the post war years, explaining the significance of reinforced flat-plate construction.
The most famous residential structures of postwar Chicago are still Mies van der Rohe’s 860-880 Lake Shore Drive with the modernist expression of their steel skeleton. But Mies also designed in concrete, as did many Chicago architects and builders throughout the 20th century.
Man-made climate change – caused by more than a century of burning fossil fuels and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere – threatens our cities and our collective future. Wood, one of humanity’s oldest construction materials, offers a path to a more sustainable built environment. An emerging system of building materials called Mass Timber is being used in ways that avoid the “carbon cost” of traditional high-rise construction in concrete and steel. And wood is a renewable resource when forests are responsibly managed.
Please join us on Tuesday, March 11 at 6pm ET for a book talk by PAULINA BREN, award-winning historian and professor, who will discuss her new book, She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street. Starting in the swinging sixties, when “No Ladies” signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and, more discreetly, inside the brokerage houses and investment banks, Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street.
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.
In Highrises: Art Deco, digital artist Chris Hytha has exploited drone photography to create stunning views of skyscrapers across the United States. His images are paired with histories researched and written by skyscraper historian Mark Houser. Join us on August 13 at 6pm to take a closer look at the character and craftsmanship of Art Deco towers across America through the drone's-eye views of the Highrises Collection. Hytha and Houser have traveled coast to coast to document noteworthy landmarks of the Jazz Age, focusing on lesser-known architectural marvels beyond the boundaries of New York City and Chicago.
Andrew Waugh is a founding director of Waugh Thistleton Architects, a British firm established in 1997 alongside Anthony Thistleton. In 2009, they completed Murray Grove, the world's first nine-story mass timber building, located in London. As a pioneer and advocate for sustainable, engineered wood in architecture, Waugh has dedicated his practice to developing efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and ambitious architectural solutions that minimize resource use. Following Waugh's presentation, he will engage in a conversation with Andrew Bernheimer, an architect and educator at Parsons School of Design. In 2015, Bernheimer edited "Timber in the City" (ORO). They will reflect on the early history of Mass Timber in North America as it learned from Europe and discuss where we stand today.
A panel of experts will cap our lecture series The Short History and Promising Future of Tall Mass Timber Buildings with a discussion of Height & Hybrids. Our speakers include structural engineers and Mass Timber specialists Benton Johnson of SOM, Alejandro Fernandez of Thornton Tomasetti, and Eric Karsh of EQUILIBRIUM who will be engaged in discussion with Daniel Sarfarik, Director of Research at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and co-author of the recent CTBUH Technical Guides on Tall Timber. Join us for a review of a decade of research on timber towers and a discussion of promising new directions and territories.
Can we build tall buildings out of wood? We can. Modern Mass Timber is a new system of building materials that also beats steel and concrete in strength by weight, with only a fraction of their "carbon costs." It's time to learn about this revolutionary material.
The Museum’s menu of Past Programs features videos of authors' talks, lectures, and symposia that explore tall buildings and cities – especially New York – from multiple perspectives. This page compiles past programs into curated series. Visit often to see what talk we’re featuring or follow a theme across several programs! Continue reading “Lecture Series”…
Left to Right: Rendering of Framework, courtesy of LEVER Architecture; Michael Green, unbuilt proposal for Cornell Tech Campus in The Case for Tall Wood Buildings, 2nd Edition, p. 82; Ascent under construction, courtesy of Thornton Tomasetti; Heartwood superstructure diagram, courtesy of atelierjones; Rendering of Atlassian Central, courtesy of SHoP Architects. The Short History and Promising Future of Tall Mass Timber Buildings As an extension of our exhibition TALL TIMBER: The Future of Cities in Wood, the Skyscraper Museum presents a series of lectures and panels that bring together key voices in the Mass Timber movement to reflect on its short history, current condition, and promising future. The revolutionary engineered-wood product, Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), began production in the North American market around 2014, two decades after European factories started to manufacture the large, strong, structural panels. The first tall (8-story) Mass Timber buildings in North America were completed in 2014 in British Columbia and 2018 in Portland, Oregon. Adoption of this new material has, however, been slow. The series asks: What are the next steps to make wood work for tall buildings, so Mass Timber can positively impact the climate crisis through the carbon-storing benefits of the renewable resource, wood? What are the range of issues must we consider to ensure Mass Timber can succeed at scale – without joining concrete and steel as extractive and carbon-intensive industries? The Museum is grateful for the support of Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown for a continuing lecture series that honors our late trustee, Continue reading “Tall Timber Lecture Series”…
Skyscrapers made of wood? Join us for a family program built on our new exhibition, TALL TIMBER: The Future of Cities in Wood. Learn about how high-rise buildings have been using engineered wood called Mass Timber as a way to help save the planet! After a tour through our exhibit, kids will imagine their own timber skyscrapers. All ages welcome. This is an in-person children’s program that meets at the Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Pl. You must reserve a place for your child/family by clicking the RSVP button above. This will forward you to Ticketstripe for sign-up. After registering, you will receive emails to confirm your attendance through a Google Form (you only need to fill this out once). If you do not confirm attendance by the Friday morning before the program, your places will be canceled. Every child should be accompanied by a parent/guardian. Family programs are free! Reservation priority is given to The Skyscraper Museum members. Want to become a member? Spring programs are supported by a Community Partnership with the Battery Park City Authority. Questions? Email programs@skyscraper.org or call our office 212-945-6324.
David West Co-founder with his partner Stephen Hill of Hill West Architects, one of New York City’s leading residential architecture firms, David West, FAIA, has played a seminal role in the advancement of high-rise design in New York City. He has been involved with more than 150 completed projects, conducted thousands of feasibility studies, and regularly sees projects from the earliest stages of land assembly to completion.
The unveiling of the design for the new headquarters for AT&T, then the largest company in the world, appeared on the front page of The New York Times on March 31, 1978 and was quickly dubbed “the first Postmodern skyscraper."
Completed in 1960, Milan’s Pirelli Tower, or Grattacielo Pirelli, was the tallest building in the Northern Italian city. Designed by the leading Italian modernist Giò Ponti in collaboration with the renowned structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, the Pirellone, or “Big Pirelli," was constructed of concrete, like nearly all Italian and European high-rises.
Skyscraper histories often treat the development and evolution of the skeletal steel frame as the very definition of the modern high-rise. Yet the story of steel leaves out what has been, arguably, the most important material to tall building construction over the past 100 years: reinforced concrete. Continue reading “In Situ: The Modern Concrete Skyscraper”…
Part architectural guidebook and part critique, Sky-High documents the pencil-thin, supertall towers that are transforming New York City's skyline and streets.
Constructed in eleven months, the 1250-foot Empire State Building, the world's tallest skyscraper from 1931 to 1971, was a marvel of modern engineering. The frame rose more than a story a day; no comparable building since has matched that rate of ascent.
(This 2003 Flash project is no longer supported) The Downtown New York Web Walk offers four interactive virtual walking tours through Lower Manhattan’s skyscraper canyons and more than a century of high-rise construction. In addition, four downloadable versions, featuring text and photographs in Adobe PDF format, are also available for touring on foot.
In The Great American Transit Disaster urban and planning historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom offers a potent re-examination of America’s history of public disinvestment in mass transit. Countering the standard histories that critique American auto-centric culture and government policies, Bloom asserts our transit networks are bad for a very simple reason: we wanted it this way.
The Museum’s menu of Past Programs features videos of authors' talks, lectures, and symposia that explore tall buildings and cities – especially New York – from multiple perspectives. This page compiles past programs into curated series. Visit often to see what talk we’re featuring or follow a theme across several programs! Continue reading “Work in Progress: Construction History in New York and Chicago, 1870-1930”…
The sixth session of the 2022 Construction History lecture series Work in Progress brings together the key presenters and the additional speakers for a virtual roundtable review and discussion of what we learned from the talks and what framing questions should be applied in future research and scholarship.
Focusing on four global cities – London, New York, Hong Kong, and Singapore – architect, urban designer, and TED Resident STEFAN AL examines rise of global supertalls and the factors that have led to this worldwide boom. He uncovers the latest innovations in sustainable building, from skyscrapers made of wood to tree-covered buildings that promise a better urban future, but also examines the issues of wealth inequality, carbon emissions, and contagion that can accompany dense high-rise development. Featuring original architectural sketches, Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives is both an exploration of our greatest accomplishments and a powerful argument for a more equitable way forward.
The fourth session of the Construction History series will examine the various dimensions in which the threat of fire affected skyscraper development. Claims of "fireproof building" were regularly disproved, often in cataclysmic fashion. Iron promised improvements over timber, but Chicago's Great Fire in 1871 revealed its vulnerability to collapse. Brick remained the only truly fireproof material, but owners and designers remained frustrated by its weight and inefficiency. The advent of lightweight terra cotta allowed architects to combine ceramic's resistance to fire with iron's efficient strength, leading to hybrid structures that allowed the safe exploitation of the skeletal frame.
The second session of the Construction History series concentrates on Frames and the evolution of metal-cage construction in each city. Chicago has claimed the “invention” of steel-skeleton construction, which historians often call “the Chicago frame.” In New York, building codes and concerns about fire discouraged the use of skeleton frames until after 1892, so alternative, hybrid systems developed. Tom Leslie and Don Friedman will examine these and other issues.
Chicago and New York offered a handful of very different preconditions that influenced the way skyscrapers were designed and built in the two cities. Chicago’s murky soil forced engineers to carefully parse their structures into point supports and broad, snowshoe-like pads, which suggested structures above could be thought of as more skeletal frames than continuous walls. The city’s large, regular lot sizes also allowed a regularity in structural grids, and its laissez-faire politics permitted thinner walls than other, eastern cities—at least through 1893, after which unions and builders began a pitched battle over the city’s building code.
The third session of the Construction History series focuses on Facades. Steel frames freed exterior walls from structural duties, allowing architects new freedom to develop facades that could respond to changing functional and aesthetic criteria. Developers' desire for efficiency and natural daylight led to thinner, lighter walls – "veneers" in the dismissive language of early critics and "curtain walls" in the parlance of more enthusiastic designers. Electric lighting, building materials, and environmental controls all played roles in changing skyscraper skins in both New York and Chicago. However, each city’s proximity to varying sources of stone, glass, and terra cotta – coupled with differing approaches to fire codes and the politics of local labor unions – created subtly different approaches to skyscraper facades.
Over the fall of 2020 during Covid restrictions, The Skyscraper Museum presented a series of webinars designed as a free online course on the early development of the skyscraper as a distinct building type. The virtual format for these talks allowed the professors from a wide array of institutions to come together for an evolving dialogue. Continue reading “Work in Progress: Construction History in New York and Chicago, 1870-1930”…
The Skyscraper Museum returns to its WORLD VIEW lecture series with a coda on the construction of the Merdeka 118 Tower in Kuala Lumpur. In December 2021, Merdeka 118 lifted its symbolic spire into place and topped out at its full height of 2,227 ft. or 679 meters to surpass the 632-meter Shanghai Tower to become the second-tallest building in the world.
Brian Lee, now a consulting partner, practiced in the SOM’s San Francisco office for 28 years before joining the Chicago office in 2007. Lee has designed landmark structures around the globe, including projects in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Among his award-winning high-rise projects are the China World Trade Center, the centerpiece of Beijing’s Central Business District, Poly International Plaza in Guangzhou, China, and the 530-meter supertall Tianjin Chow Tai Fook Binhai Centre.
