Book Talks & Lectures
In the ongoing reinvention of Williamsburg’s richly historic industrial waterfront into a burgeoning residential neighborhood, the massive Domino Sugar complex remains the greatest challenge and opportunity. With a site of 11.2 acres and a potential for 2200 residential units, including 30 percent of subsidized affordable housing, more than four acres of public open space, and the restoration and adaptive reuse of the landmarked refinery buildings, the Domino site is key to both the past and the future of this evolving neighborhood.
The program featured presentations by the principals of the development, design, engineering and construction teams, followed by a panel discussion.
Speakers
Carol Willis
Director, The Skyscraper Museum
Carol Willis is the founder, director, and curator of The Skyscraper Museum. An architectural and urban historian, she has researched, taught, and written about the history of American city building. She is the author of Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), which received an AIA book award and was named “Best Book on North American Urbanism, 1995” by the Urban History Association. She has written introductions to several monographs and collections and has appeared in numerous television documentaries and radio broadcasts.
Ms. Willis is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University where since 1989 she has taught in the program The Shape of Two Cities: New York and Paris in The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Frederick A. Bland
Managing Partner,
Book Talks & Lectures
Among the extraordinary new crop of New York’s super-slim, ultra-luxury residential towers surveyed in The Skyscraper Museum’s exhibition SKY HIGH & the logic of luxury, the most slender of all is the 111 W. 57th St., designed by SHoP Architects, with structural engineering by WSP Group for JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group. With a ratio of the width of the base to height of 1:23, the 1,350+ ft tower will be the most slender building in the world.
SHoP’s design harkens back to the quality, materiality, and emphatic verticality of historic NYC skyscrapers, while utilizing advanced engineering and technology to craft a contemporary contribution to the skyline. The tower’s silhouette rises in an elegant series of feathered setbacks, while the faade reads at multiple scales and vantage points. An intricate pattern of shaped terracotta panels and bronze latticework on the east and west facades creates a sweeping play of light and shadow, while a glass curtain wall on the north and south faades provide sweeping views of Central Park and Midtown.
SHoP Architects was founded in 1996 on a premise of proving that intelligent and evocative architecture can be made in the real world, with real world constraints, and has made a name for itself by pioneering the use of innovative technologies to produce both iconic architectural forms and a new model for the profession.
WSP is one of the world’s leading professional services firms. Its New York-based structural engineer,
Book Talks & Lectures
In conjunction with its exhibition TIMES SQUARE, 1984, The Skyscraper Museum presents a series of programs that reunite key actors in the transformation of Times Square over the past three decades. Each evening focuses on a set of issues and questions that ask the original authors, including government officials, planners, urban designers, developers, architects, preservationists, and activists, what really happened in the Eighties, and how do they assess their actions today?
In the early 1980s, preservationists battled to save historic theaters in two areas called “Times Square.” On 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, the urban renewal plans of the NYS Urban Development Corporation (UDC) sought to rescue derelict theaters and return the blighted block, plagued with high crime rates and pornography, to more populist entertainments.
In the northern section of Times Square along the spine of Broadway, allied forces of actors and producers, including Joseph Papp, preservationists, architects, and civic groups fought on several fronts against the demolition of historic theaters still in active use. Although the beloved Helen Hayes and Morosco were ultimately razed in 1982 to make way for the Portman Marriott Marquis Hotel, the political action of these groups united to give impetus to the eventual landmark designation of 28 Broadway theaters.
Further, the issue of a broad, but subjective preservation value of a “sense of place” became a special focus for many architects and activists dedicated to saving Times Square. Many argued that new high-rise development encouraged by zoning would obliterate the “bowl of light”- the open sky above the bright electric advertising signs in the “bow-tie”
Book Talks & Lectures
Nearly four hundred years after its founding, New York, which grew and grew through “creative destruction,” is a mature metropolis. How can the city adapt and advance in the 21st century? “New Verizons” looks at the high-value real estate portfolio of buildings erected for 20th-century telephone technology and how developers, architects, and engineers are retrofitting and re-positioning these properties.
Project teams present two case studies: 375 Pearl Street and 1095 Avenue oof the Americas
Book Talks & Lectures
This conference is the second of an ongoing exchange between the world’s great vertical cities. The first conference, Vertical Density | Sustainable Solutions was presented in New York in October 2008.
Vertical Density: the Public Dimension will bring together city officials, planners, architects, and developers from Hong Kong, New York, and Shanghai to discuss the comparative architecture, urbanism, and public space. The delegation from New York–the featured speakers introducing the themes of the dialogue–include Robert Tierney, Chairman, NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, Alex Washburn, Chief Urban Designer, NYC Department of City Planning, as well as Paul Katz, Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and Carol Willis, Director of The Skyscraper Museum, both of whom served as conference organizers.
Other speakers who will discuss the creation of waterfront and urban parks, pedestrianization projects, and public-private partnerships include: Hilary Ballon, Associate Vice Chancellor and Professor of History of Art & Architecture, New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE; James Cavanaugh, President, The Battery Park City Authority; Vishaan Chakrabarti, Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate Development and Director, Real Estate Development Program, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, Preservation (GSAPP); Charles Maikish, Managing Director of Global Corporate Services and Real Estate, BlackRock and BlackRock/Barclays; and Carl Weisbrod, former President, Times Square and Lower Manhattan BIDs, and currently President, Trinity Church Realty Division.
The Hong Kong conference is the second of an ongoing exchange between the world’s great vertical cities. The first conference, Hong Kong | New York: Vertical Density | Sustainable Solutions was organized by The Skyscraper Museum and presented in New York in October 2008.
Book Talks & Lectures
Vertical Density: the Public Dimension brings together city officials, planners, architects, and developers from Hong Kong, New York, and Shanghai to discuss the comparative architecture, urbanism, and public space. The delegation from New York–the featured speakers introducing the themes of the dialogue–include Robert Tierney, Chairman, NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, Alex Washburn, Chief Urban Designer, NYC Department of City Planning, as well as Paul Katz, Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, and Carol Willis, Director of The Skyscraper Museum, both of whom served as conference organizers.
Other speakers who will discuss the creation of waterfront and urban parks, pedestrianization projects, and public-private partnerships include Hilary Ballon, Associate Vice-Chancellor and Professor of History of Art & Architecture, New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE; James Cavanaugh, President, The Battery Park City Authority; Vishaan Chakrabarti, Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate Development and Director, Real Estate Development Program, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, Preservation (GSAPP); Charles Maikish, Managing Director of Global Corporate Services and Real Estate, BlackRock and BlackRock/Barclays; and Carl Weisbrod, former President, Times Square and Lower Manhattan BIDs, and currently President, Trinity Church Realty Division.
The Hong Kong conference is the second of an ongoing exchange between the world’s great vertical cities. The first conference, Hong Kong | New York: Vertical Density | Sustainable Solutions was organized by The Skyscraper Museum and presented in New York in October 2008. This year’s conference also includes Shanghai, which is rapidly transforming into one of the world’s premier skyscraper cities and will host the 2010 World Expo under the theme “Better City,
Book Talks & Lectures
Shanghai Tower. Wikimedia Baycrest.
The second lecture in The Skyscraper Museum's five-part fall lecture series, Shanghai Skyline, was presented on October 20, 2009 at the Asia Society.
Introduced by Michael Roberts of Asia Society and Carol Willis of The Skyscraper Museum, the project team of the Shanghai Tower presented the design concept and the structural and mechanical engineering employed to construct the tallest tower in China. Scheduled for completion in 2014, the 632-meter Shanghai Tower clearly asserts the city's ambitions and commitment to high-rise urbanism.
Speakers
Jun Xia, Gensler's Regional Director, the project's design architect, introduced the audience to Shanghai and its new economic and trade zone, Lujiazui, the site for the Shanghai Tower. Rounding out the trio of towers, Jun Xia explained the tower's innovative spiraling and "futuristic" form in relationship to the others, as Jin Mao's traditional pagoda-like structure represents Shanghai's past; the sharp edges of Shanghai World Financial Center's sculpted form represents the rise of the Chinese economy in the present. The Shanghai Tower will be the tallest of the three, overtopping the SWFC by 140 meters and creating a harmonious sightline for Shanghai's skyline. Xia explained that the city's tallest tower will rotate 120 degrees as it rises to create its elegant asymmetrical shape. The building is segmented into zones, or neighborhoods, to create a vertical community. The façade creates interstitial interior/exterior space, a nod to Chinese tradition and emphasizing sustainable values.
Dennis Poon,
Book Talks & Lectures
Bruce Fowle reflects on the evolution of his firm’s pioneering place in high-performance high-rise design, from the Condé Nast Building at 4 Times Square to an array of current residential and mixed-use projects.
Speakers
Bruce Fowle, FAIA, LEED, Senior Principal
Peter Weingarten, AIA, LEED, Senior Associate
Book Talks & Lectures
In a joint lecture on the firm’s decade of work in Shanghai entitled “SOM in Shanghai: Jin Mao and Beyond,” design partner Ross Wimer and structural engineer Bill Baker described how the pagoda-like Jin Mao, the first major tower of Lujiazui, or Pudong, became a stepping off point for SOM’s practice in Shanghai. The relationship between Baker, Structural and Civil Engineering Partner at SOM, and Wimer exuded the camaraderie of longtime friends. They spoke about how their professional relationship as engineer and architect parallels and informs their design process as seen in their presentation.
Bill Baker introduced the design of Shanghai’s Jin Mao tower and its innovative structural engineering and core. Although now “the little guy” in Pudong’s skyline, it was the tallest building in China when constructed in 1999. Its 88 stories reflect the symbolic “lucky eights” and take the form of a pagoda. Efficiently constructed around an octagonal concrete core, a circular atrium pushes the Grand Hyatt hotel rooms to the building’s perimeter in the upper zone. The cylindrical core of Jin Mao has been applied to many other projects presented in the program.
Baker further explained the level of experimentation possible in China. With a simple and standardized toolkit of process, software, and tools including the Michell truss, architects and engineers are able to create “Architecture with a capital A.” Ross Wimer presented a series of case studies focusing on the design and structure collaborations. The design submitted for the Z3 site in Shanghai (upon which Gensler is constructing the winning entry,
Book Talks & Lectures
Photo by David Iliff (cropped)
Vertical Density: the Public Dimension will bring together city officials, planners, architects, and developers from Hong Kong, New York, and Shanghai to discuss the comparative architecture, urbanism, and public space. The delegation from New York–the featured speakers introducing the themes of the dialogue–include Robert Tierney, Chairman, NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, Alex Washburn, Chief Urban Designer, NYC Department of City Planning, as well as Paul Katz, Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, and Carol Willis, Director of The Skyscraper Museum, both of whom served as conference organizers.
Other speakers who will discuss the creation of waterfront and urban parks, pedestrianization projects, and public-private partnerships include Hilary Ballon, Associate Vice-Chancellor and Professor of History of Art & Architecture, New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE; James Cavanaugh, President, The Battery Park City Authority; Vishaan Chakrabarti, Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate Development and Director, Real Estate Development Program, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, Preservation (GSAPP); Charles Maikish, Managing Director of Global Corporate Services and Real Estate, BlackRock and BlackRock/Barclays; and Carl Weisbrod, former President, Times Square and Lower Manhattan BIDs, and currently President, Trinity Church Realty Division.
The Hong Kong conference is the second of an ongoing exchange between the world's great vertical cities. The first conference, Hong Kong | New York: Vertical Density | Sustainable Solutions was organized by The Skyscraper Museum and presented in New York in October 2008. This year’s conference also includes Shanghai, which is rapidly transforming into one of the world’s premier skyscraper cities and will host the 2010 World Expo under the theme “Better City,
Book Talks & Lectures
Drawing on new discoveries in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, in her new book Welcome to Your World, architecture critic and historian Sarah Williams Goldhagen probes how environments profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being. In this Skyscraper Seminar, conceived as a conversation with design professionals, Goldhagen will focus on issues of high-rise living and urban density. Drawing on the examples from her book, she’ll suggest how to bring new research and insights to construct a world better suited to human experience.
Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Sarah Williams Goldhagen is a writer, lecturer, and contributing editor to the Architectural Record and Art in America. Previously, she was the architecture critic at the New Republic and a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Her essays and criticism on the topic of the built environment have appeared in both scholarly and general-interest publications.
Book Talks & Lectures
Nicknamed “Satan’s Highway,” “The Mile of Hell,” and “The Street of Forgotten Men,” the Bowery was a synonym for despair throughout most of the 20th century. In Devil’s Mile, Alice Sparberg Alexiou traces the history of the thoroughfare to explain how it evolved from a street of high-end homes to an infamous stretch of flophouses and dive bars. From the origins of the “bouwerie” as a Lenape trail, to its deterioration, then rebirth in the 1990s, Alexiou bears witness to the old Bowery, and retrieves its disappearing memories.
Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Alice Sparberg Alexiou writes about New York City. With this lecture, she joins the elite three-peat club of Skyscraper Museum authors, following her book on The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It (2010) and before that, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (2006). Alexiou is a contributing editor at Lilith magazine and she blogs for the Gotham Center. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has a Ph.D. in classics from Fordham University.
Book Talks & Lectures
Continuing our series of close examinations of the typology of supertalls, this seminar led by Forth Bagley of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates will focus on the 530-meter Chow Tai Fook Centre in Guangzhou, China. When completed late next year, the CTF Centre will be the city’s tallest building, a symbol of Guangzhou’s growing economic might within the Pearl River Delta and one of the most programmatically complex super tall towers ever constructed. Housing office, residential, hotel and retail program within a high-tech “breathing” facade made of glazed terra cotta and metal, the tower has become a model of sustainable, high-density, center-city architecture.
Forth Bagley
Forth Bagley is a Director at KPF with over ten years of experience in the design and management of a range of commercial projects, including hotel, retail, residential and mixed-use projects in the United States, England, China, Thailand, and India. He has focused on issues of density, the intersection of public and private space, and the intricate programmatic relationships of some of the most complex projects in the contemporary city.
Book Talks & Lectures
The Manhattan skyline is one of the great wonders of the modern world. But how and why did it form? Jason M. Barr’s book Building the Skyline explores the economic forces that shaped our high-rise history. Barr chronicles the economic history of the Manhattan skyline from colonial times through the rise of the skyscraper, both downtown and in midtown, along the way debunking some popular misconceptions such as “geology is geography” on the determinative role of bedrock. Investigating of the impetus for the extraordinary levels of skyscraper construction during the Roaring Twenties, the book argues that the boom was largely a rational response to the rapidly expanding economic growth of the nation and city.
The final chapter investigates the value of Manhattan Island and the relationship between skyscrapers and land prices.
Jason Barr
Jason M. Barr is an associate professor of economics at Rutgers University – Newark whose areas of interests include urban economics, New York City history, and computational economics. He has taught economics at Rutgers, Dartmouth College, and Columbia University.
Book Talks & Lectures
In his new book, Mall City: Hong Kong’s Dreamworlds of Consumption, Stefan Al analyzes Hong Kong as the world’s laboratory of vertical urbanism. The city continues to build ever-higher-density mega-complexes of residential and office towers standing on a podium shopping mall, often integrated with railway infrastructure. These podium-tower developments are cities in and of themselves, accommodating up to tens of thousands of people who live, work and play within a single structure. Stretching up to 26 stories and incorporating stunning vertical atria with dynamic “expresscalators,” these complexes have become one of Hong Kong’s basic units of urban development, like the skyscraper is of New York City. Highly efficient urban forms, they also set in stone a culture of consumerism.
Stefan Al
Stefan Al is an architect and urban designer. An Associate Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania, he teaches courses and studios on Urban Design and co-teaches, with Jonathan Barnett and Gary Hack, an online Coursera class “Designing Cities” that reaches more than 65,000 students. A leading expert on urbanization in developing countries, high-density cities, and cities of spectacle and entertainment, Als has authored and edited numerous books, including Factory Towns of South China, Villages in the City, Mall City, and Macau and the Casino Complex, as well as a recent work on Las Vegas, The Strip. Stefan Al holds a doctorate in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley, an M.Arch. from The Bartlett, and an M.Sc. from Delft University of Technology.
Book Talks & Lectures
Taller than the rooftop of either the original or current 1 WTC, 432 Park Avenue will top out in 2015 at 1,396 feet, making it–in the words of its developers Macklowe Properties and the CIM Group–the loftiest residence “in the Western Hemisphere.” Exemplifying “the logic of luxury,” the tower’s soaring height is predicated on its compact 93-foot square floor plate and extra-high ceilings, which produce its slenderness ratio of 1:15. The emphatic white grid of the concrete frame, divided into six sections by open mechanical floors, represents an integration of the elegant architectural concept and structural logic that sets 432 Park Avenue apart from curtain-wall contemporaries.
Rafael Viñoly
Rafael Viñoly is the founding principal of Rafael Viñoly Architects PC, a New York-based firm with international practice. Viñoly’s award-winning designs include museums, performing arts centers, convention centers, and numerous research and academic buildings and complexes. His commercial high-rise work began in the 1980s, and he explored innovative forms and structural strategies in several projects, including the post-9/11 WTC competition, in which the collaborative design of the THINK team for a World Cultural Center was a finalist.
Book Talks & Lectures
SKY HIGH examines the recent proliferation of super-slim, ultra-luxury residential towers on the rise in Manhattan. These pencil-thin buildings-all 50 to 90+ stories-constitute a new type of skyscraper in a city where tall, slender structures have a long history.
Sophisticated engineering and advances in material strengths have made these spindles possible, but it is the excited market for premium Manhattan real estate that is driving both heights and prices skyward, Reported sales seem almost inconceivable: some penthouses in the buildings featured here are in contract for $47 million to $95 million. The rarified geographies of where these projects take shape and the economics of high land costs, high-style design and construction, and stratospheric sales prices are deconstructed. The buildings featured include the super-slender towers of the “57th Street phenomenon”-432 Park Avenue, One57, and the feather-thin 111 West 57th scheme-as well as downtown’s 56 Leonard, the Four Seasons at 30 Park Place, and the planned Tower D in Hudson Yards.
Ultra-luxury is a distinct clientele, to which the towers’ developers direct their branding and marketing psychology. But there is also a “simple math” in the logic of luxury that shapes the design of these projects in every aspect.
Carol Willis
Carol Willis is the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum and a professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning. She is also the author of Form Follows Financeand co-author of Building the Empire State with Donald Friedman.
Book Talks & Lectures
In recent years, contemporary architectural theory and practice have shifted from a focus on how a building appears to how it performs. In the field of skyscraper design, the emergence of ultra-performing materials, interactive processing systems, and digital design and fabrication techniques are making remarkable new structures possible. In Performative Skyscraper, architect Scott Johnson describes how the combination of sophisticated modeling software and demands for ever-increasing environmental sustainability have led to an emphasis on high performance. From advanced window-walls to vertical mixed-use towers, Johnson captures the breadth and immediacy of skyscraper design now.
Scott Johnson
Scott Johnson is the founding design partner of the Los Angeles architecture firm, Johnson Fain. He has designed a wide variety of buildings worldwide and is currently working on high-rise buildings in Jakarta, Taichung City, and L.A., as well as mixed-use projects throughout the West Coast. He is a former Director of the Master of Architecture Programs at the USC School of Architecture and frequently lectures on the evolution of modern cities and the emergence of new building typologies. His previous books include The Big Idea: Criticality + Practice in Contemporary Architecture and Tall Building: Imagining the Skyscraper.
Book Talks & Lectures
Arguably the most important architect of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier invented new ways of building and thinking. In Modern Man, Anthony Flint offers a popular biography of a constant self-inventor, as well as a sweeping tale filled with exotic locales and high-stakes projects. Flint’s Corbusier isn’t just the grandfather of modern architecture but a man who sought to remake the world according to his vision, dispelling the Victorian style and replacing it with something entirely new. If his s legacy remains controversial today, the evidence of his genius is secure.
Anthony Flint
Anthony Flint is the author of two previous books: Wrestling with Moses and This Land. A former Boston Globe reporter, he is a fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and contributes to The Atlantic Cities website.
Book Talks & Lectures
The Liar’s Ball describes the desperate scramble that ensued when the world’s most expensive building went on the auction block. The iconic GM Building brought out the best and worst in New York’s real estate royalty, and led a few of them to ruin.
A story of naked, unregulated capitalism, of the sometimes bloody free-for all of the free market, The Liars Ball is tale of brilliant and enormously ambitious billionaires fighting bare-knuckled to get what they want. And they all wanted the GM Building. Through over 200 interviews with real estate’s best and brightest—Donald Trump, Harry Macklowe, Samuel Zell, Mort Zuckerman and many more—Ward exposes the lies and schemes and insecurities behind the deals made by some of the world’s biggest egos.
Vicky Ward
Vicky Ward is the New York-based, British-born author of the New York Times bestseller The Devil s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High-Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers (Wiley, 2010). A former contributing editor to Vanity Fair for 11 years, she is the former executive editor of Talk and the former news features editor of the New York Post. She holds a master s in English literature from Cambridge University.
Book Talks & Lectures
Architectural historian Annice Alt has relentlessly tracked the buildings and careers of the New York architect Russell Boak and his successive partners Hyman Paris and Thomas Raad, researching their work from the earliest Art Deco examples in the late 1920s through their mid-century Modern work of the 1950s and 1960s. Her book reconstructs the firm’s four-decade practice, focusing in particular on their many residential high-rises, viewed in the context of the speculative real estate development that has significantly shaped streetscapes and neighborhoods across the city. In a testament to the architect s work, one of his key clients, developer Elihu Rose of Rose Associates, recalled Russell Boak was “an unsung architect who was incapable of doing a bad drawing, a bad design. No one (was) comparable.
Annice M. Alt
Raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Annice Alt began her immersion in the architectural history of New York City began after her retirement from her work in early childhood education. Boak & Paris / Boak & Raad: New York Architects is her first book
Book Talks & Lectures
The Skyscraper Museum introduced a new lecture series WHAT’S UP? which highlights innovative high-rise architecture around the world. The series started with the work of WOHA, an internationally-acclaimed practice based in Singapore, established in 1994 by Richard Hassell and Wong Mun Summ. With a particular focus on Asia and the tropics, WOHA explores architectural strategies in response to contemporary issues of urbanization, density, sustainability, and climate. Their award-winning 69-story skyscraper in the heart of Bangkok, The Met, is a naturally-ventilated green tower that employs both public and private sky terraces and gardens in a new model for high-density urbanism.
Richard Hassell
Richard Hassell, co-Founding Director of WOHA, discussed Breathing Architecture, an overview of the firm’s recent work, from high-rise public housing to a visionary city of 5 million on just 45 square kilometres. The title refers to the climate-based approaches to sustainable design explored in the firm’s recent monograph and in a travelling exhibition of their work organized by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany.
Book Talks & Lectures
The Skyscraper Museum continues its WHAT’S UP? series on international skyscraper design and development.
Christoph Ingenhoven
Christoph Ingenhoven is the founding principal of ingenhoven architects, a Dusseldorf-based firm with an increasingly international practice. His assertively modernist work emphasizes ecological principles in combination with innovative engineering and close attention to the public realm. In 2012, his sleek, sustainable, and elegant design for 1 Bligh Street in Sydney, Australia (with Architectus) won the International High-Rise Award of the DAM, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, the Best Tall Building in Asia & Australasia Award of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, as well as numerous other prizes.
Book Talks & Lectures
Completed in 1913, the 792-foot Woolworth Building doubled the height of the tallest skyscraper of 1900, the neighboring Park Row Building, and surpassed the 1908 SInger Building by 180 feet. The rapid rise in height, from Park Row, to Singer, to the 700-foot Metropolitan Life Tower in 1909, reflects the arrival of mature steel-frame technology.
Gunvald Aus, the chief engineer of the Woolworth Building, was one of a group of turn-of-the-century structural engineers who were designing ever-larger steel-frame buildings and openly debating the best engineering methods for high-rise design and construction. At a time when the building codes and engineering education was still catching up to the reality of skyscrapers, this professional debate on the proper methods of dealing with foundations, wind loads, and supporting masonry curtain walls served as a method of technology transfer that allowed engineers who had not previously designed tall steel-frame buildings to understand key issues.
Donald Friedman
Donald Friedman, a structural engineer, is the president of Old Structures Engineering and lives in New York City. He is the author of Historical Building Construction; After 9-11: An Engineer s Work at the World Trade Center; The Investigation of Buildings; The Design of Renovations, with Nathaniel Oppenheimer; and Building the Empire State with Carol Willis.
Book Talks & Lectures
Today, one in five homeowners in American cities and suburbs lives in a multifamily home rather than a single-family dwelling. As the American dream evolves, precipitated by declining real estate prices and a renewed interest in city living, many predict that condos will become the predominant form of housing in the 21st century. In this unprecedented study Matthew Gordon Lasner explores the history of co-owned multifamily housing in the United States, from New York City’s first co-op, in 1881, to contemporary condo and townhouse complexes coast to coast. Lasner explains the complicated social, economic, and political factors that have increased demand for this way of living, situating the trend within the larger housing market and broad shifts in residential architecture. He contrasts the prevalence and popularity of condos, townhouses, and other privately governed communities with their ambiguous economic, legal, and social standing, as well as their striking absence from urban and architectural history.
Matthew Gordon Lasner
Matthew Gordon Lasner is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and planning at Hunter College, City University of New York, where he teaches courses on urbanism, US and global housing, and the built environment. He is the author of High-Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century.
Book Talks & Lectures
Curator Carol Willis reflects on the research for the exhibition News PAPER Spires and proposes that New York’s early newspaper headquarters represent an extraordinary new form of high-rise: vertical urban factories that exploit technological advances in both printing and building construction to multiply the real estate advantages of prime locations. The lecture traces the rise of the signature towers of “Newspaper Row,” on the east side of City Hall Park, from the 1870s through the early 1900s, then the migration uptown that spawned both Times Square and the E. 42nd Street axis with the headquarters of the Daily News
Carol Willis
Carol Willis is the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum and a professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning. She is also the author of Form Follows Finance and co-author of Building the Empire State with Donald Friedman.
Book Talks & Lectures
For well over a century, the modern skyscraper has provided an ingenious solution to high-density living and working. In the contemporary context of drastic urban growth, its role can only gain in importance. Firley analyzes fifty case studies from Rockefeller Center in Manhattan to Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, from Hong Kong to Sao Paulo to explore how planning authorities use tall buildings to realize their urban goals and visions, and addresses the uneasy relationship between high-rise structures and sustainability.
Eric Firley
Eric Firley is a French-German architect and urban designer. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture and heads an international research consultancy. In addition to The Urban Towers Handbook, Firley is the author of The Urban Housing Handbook (Wiley, 2011), written with Caroline Stahl.
Book Talks & Lectures
The Ladies’ Garment Industry was New York City’s largest employer in the first half of the 20th century, and “Seventh Avenue” was the city’s most famous industry. While much has been written about the history of the unions and of fashion in general, this lecture and the related URBAN FABRIC exhibition focus on the architecture and development of the Garment District. Curator Andrew Dolkart discusses the character of the high-rise lofts and the forces that led to the creation of one of New York’s most distinctive neighborhoods.
Andrew S. Dolkart
Andrew S. Dolkart is the Director of the Historic Preservation Program and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He is the author of numerous books on the architecture and urban development of New York City, focusing in particular on the city’s everyday, vernacular building types, including Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development, Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street, and The Row House Reborn: Architecture and Neighborhoods in New York City 1908-1929.
Book Talks & Lectures
In this hour-long illustrated slide lecture, structural engineer Donald Friedman highlights the sections on high-rise history from the updated edition of his classic text detailing the ins and outs of old building construction.
A comprehensive guide to the physical construction of buildings from the 1840s to the present, this study covers the history of concrete- , steel- , and skeleton-frame buildings, provides case histories that apply the information to a wide range of actual projects, and supplies technical data essential to professionals who work with historic structures.
Donald Friedman
Donald Friedman, a structural engineer, is the president of Old Structures Engineering and lives in New York City. He is the author of Historical Building Construction; After 9-11: An Engineer s Work at the World Trade Center; The Investigation of Buildings; The Design of Renovations, with Nathaniel Oppenheimer; and Building the Empire State with Carol Willis.
Book Talks & Lectures
Burj Dubai added a story every three days to its concrete frame to finally become the world’s tallest building, surpassing the former title-holder Taipei 101 at 508 meters. In January of 2009, Burj Dubai’s height was finally announced to top off at 818 meters. New Yorkers can imagine the Chrysler Building stacked atop of the Empire State to have an idea of its height and volume.
Height, heat, and concrete are three basic challenges of this titanic project that was constructed by the high-rise experts of South Korea’s Samsung Corporation. Turner International was the project and construction manager. The executive in charge of Highrise Building and Structural Engineering Divisions for the Samsung Corporation, general contractors Burj Dubai, explained the planning and execution of this unprecedented feat of skyscraper construction.
Ahmad Abdelrazaq
Executive Director, Highrise Building and Structural Engineering Divisions, Samsung Corporation.
