Book Talks & Lectures
In the 1920s, a new vision of the future swept American culture: a skyscraper city of monumental towers, multilevel highways, aerial transport, and densely developed commercial districts. An invention principally of New York architects and planners, this hyper-concentrated urbanism was set forth in dazzling images in exhibitions, newspapers, books, popular magazines, art galleries, department stores, and movies.
The inspiration and motivation for these prophecies were New York itself. Soaring buildings, hurtling subways, and teeming crowds made Gotham uniquely modern. In 1925, New York passed London to become the world’s largest metropolis. With a population of nearly six million in the city proper and ten million in the region, New York was booming, and the crowding in Manhattan’s business districts and phenomenal pace of high-rise development seemed to promise that every block would soon be built anew. Visions of super-scaled setbacks linked by elevated highways and multilevel transit reflected an obsession with the problem of congestion, as well as optimism that the new tool of zoning offered a way to regulate and channel capitalist growth.
Forecasts of the future city generally extrapolate present-day fears or enthusiasms. As politically naive, alienating, or simply fantastic as many of these prophecies seem today, an essential insight of their collective vision is clear: skyscrapers would define the urban future. Indeed, as skyscrapers spread around the globe, no place better predicted the future of the modern city than New York itself.
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,
Book Talks & Lectures
Lavish historical scenery often appeared in Ferriss’s fantasy drawings of the early twenties. In 1922, the year of the famed competition for the Chicago Tribune tower, the skyscraper was still pre-modern, at least in terms of style. Although he preached the prospect of a new architecture born of the zoning law in his 1922 New York Times article, Ferriss had no stance on what these new towers should look like, so, like most of the architects of the period, he summoned historical precedents.
Ferriss was less attracted to famous monuments like the Parthenon or Chartres than to vast architectural tableaux of the ancient civilizations of the Near East, Indochina, or Imperial Rome. A fascination with Babylon and other fallen civilizations was a popular theme among artists and writers in the early twentieth century, and the Tower of Babel was a common trope for setback skyscrapers, which were often referred to as modern ziggurats in the “New Babylon of New York.”
In these pen-and-ink drawings of 1922 and 1924, which are much closer to his earlier graphic style than to the dark charcoal renderings of the later twenties, Ferriss evokes a new cityscape of setback towers topped by expansive terraces, roof gardens, and a new urban elite who live in the sky.
Carol Willis
Carol is the founder, director, and curator of The Skyscraper Museum, located in Battery Park City. An architectural and urban historian, Carol is the author of the book Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago,
Book Talks & Lectures
The skyscraper, whatever it may be as a physical fact, looms large in our lives and as a figment of our imaginations carries with it ideas of wealth, ambition, and dominance. The image of the skyscraper has been made and remade in the news, in literature and film, and now in all forms of our now global media. Paradoxically, as the building type continues to become more complex and is designed to address fundamentally different cultural conditions, the image, that is to say, the idea, of the skyscraper in the public mind, seems to become simpler, more omnipresent, and more consumable.
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
Marrying engineering efficiencies and structural solutions with dynamic material design has made Helmut Jahn an innovator in energy-conscious high-rises, including the Deutsche Post Tower in Bonn, Germany, and an affordable housing project in Chicago.
Helmut Jahn
Helmut Jahn is President and CEO at Murphy/Jahn. Marrying engineering efficiencies and structural solutions with dynamic material design has made Helmut Jahn an innovator in energy-conscious high-rises, including the Deutsche Post Tower in Bonn, Germany, and an affordable housing project in Chicago.
Book Talks & Lectures
A pioneer of the “bioclimatic skyscraper” Ken Yeang considers the nature of the site, employing passive, low-energy strategies. Based in Kuala Lumpur and London, Dr. Yeang has been a global leader in promoting an environmental approach to high-rise buildings.
Book Talks & Lectures
Carol Willis, director and founder of the Museum, looked back on the high-rise history of Wall Street before the days of the “Skyscraper Rivals”. Her talk previewed material to be published by the Museum and W.W. Norton in the book “At the Corner of Capital”.
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
Architect Eric Howeler talks about his new book Skyscraper: Vertical Now and examines how the skyscraper shapes our urban existence and continues to serve as a symbol of our collective aspirations.
Exploring over 70 skyscraper designs of the recent past and near future, Howeler examines the cultural, technological, and social factors governing skyscrapers, the emergence of the “green skyscraper”, the Asian skyscraper and the influence of the international landscape, and major works from the world’s leading architects including KPF, Foster, SOM, Calatrava, Koolhaas, Nouvel, and many more.
Eric P. Howeler
Eric Howeler is an architect, architectural writer and co-founder of Howeler + Yoon Architecture. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to forming Howeler + Yoon Architecture, he was a senior designer at Diller + Scofidio, and an Associate Principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, where he worked on many Hong Kong high-rise projects. Howeler is the author of Skyscraper: Vertical Now.
Speakers
Richard Roth, Jr., practiced architecture from the early 1960s through the 1990s as part of the third generation of the family firm Emery Roth & Sons. Rising to chief architect, Richard led the designs for many major high-rises in the booming post-war development of Manhattan, including 55 Water Street and the Palace Hotel, and as the architect of record for the World Trade Center and the Pan Am (Met Life) Building
Speakers
Douglas Mass is President of Cosentini Associates, a consulting MEP engineering firm headquartered in New York, with international offices. In his thirty-year career in mechanical engineering, Doug Mass has been responsible for hundreds of projects throughout the United States and abroad, including major mixed-use developments, museums, performing arts centers, hotels/resorts, high-rise commercial office buildings, corporate headquarters and educational facilities. An early leader in sustainable design, his projects have included Four Times Square, the first sustainable commercial high-rise in New York City, and Battery Park City’s “The Solaire,” the first high-rise residential building in the country to obtain LEED Gold certification.
Doug Mass is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and lectures frequently at universities and industry-sponsored events on sustainable design topics and super high-rise buildings. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Corporate Real Estate Executive, Facilities Design and Management, Contract Magazine and New York Real Estate Journal.
Speakers
Throughout his 30+ years experience Dennis Poon has been responsible for the design and construction of super tall structures, mixed-use buildings, hotels, airports, arenas and residential buildings worldwide. Notable projects include lead partner in the structural engineering team for the design of Taipei 101 in Taiwan (the tallest building in the world between 2003 and 2009) and the 66-story high-rise mixed-use Plaza 66 in Shanghai. Currently, Mr. Poon is working on several 100+ story towers, including the Ping An Insurance Projects in China, as well as the 601-meter 151 Incheon twin towers in South Korea, and several high-rise projects in the Middle East, in addition to the Shanghai Tower. He has extensive expertise on seismic design and performance-based design with complex mixed-use structures worldwide. In addition to his responsibilities as managing principal of the firm, Mr. Poon is in charge of the firm’s international operation with branch offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He has lectured at universities worldwide including the MIT, Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Rutgers University.
Speakers
As Partner in the New York office of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Paul Katz focuses on the planning, design, and development of office, mixed-use, and high-rise buildings. He has senior responsibilities in all aspects of commercial architecture, including business development, management, and design. Mr. Katz helped to establish KPF’s strong presence in Japan and Hong Kong, and has been instrumental in setting up the firm’s China operations in Shanghai.
Mr. Katz is currently working with several leading commercial developers in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Canary Wharf, Mori Building, Sun Hung Kai, Hongkong Land, and Shui On Land. His recent projects include: 505 Fifth Avenue, New York Sports and Convention Center, part of the New York 2012 Olympic Games bid; the Clifford Chance office tower in Canary Wharf, London; Roppongi Hills, which includes facilities for Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and a Grand Hyatt Tokyo; and the Shanghai World Financial Center, now under construction.
An active member of the Urban Land Institute, he has helped promote its activities internationally. He co-authored Building Type Basics for Office Buildings, published by Wiley in 2002. Mr. Katz has provided expert interviews in tall building design to print media such as Newsweek, The Economist, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Wired, among others.
Speakers
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.
Speakers
Based in Kuala Lumpur and London, Dr. Yeang has been a global leader in promoting an environmental approach to high-rise building.
Speakers
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.
Speakers
Rafael Viñoly is the founding principal of Rafael Viñoly Architects PC, a New York-based firm with an 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.
Speakers
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.
Speakers
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.
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
Speakers
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.
Speakers
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.
Speakers
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.
Speakers
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.
Speakers
Jennifer Raab is the President of Hunter College, a position she has held since 2001. She served as Chairwoman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1995 – 2001, during which time 25 sites in the Financial District were designated landmarks. Her initiative to work with commercial property owners to landmark and adaptively reuse their high-rises with historic preservation tax credits and abatements succeeded in protecting more at least 20 historic skyscrapers in the Downtown district.
Speakers
Architect Bruce Fowle co-founded FXFOWLE in 1978 and has since guided the firm to international recognition for excellence in design and environmental responsibility. Mr. Fowle’s design leadership continues to shape many of the firm’s most recognized projects, ranging from high-rise, multi-use complexes to cultural institutions and private homes. Mr. Fowle’s current commissions include a new dormitory for the Berkshire School, the expansion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center (in association with A. Epstein & Sons, International), a new LEED Platinum headquarters building for SAP Americas in Pennsylvania, and a carbon-neutral museum celebrating the historic Housatonic River in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
Speakers
Eric Howeler is an architect, architectural writer and co-founder of Howeler + Yoon Architecture. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to forming Howeler + Yoon Architecture, he was a senior designer at Diller + Scofidio, and an Associate Principal at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, where he worked on many Hong Kong high-rise projects. Howeler is the author of Skyscraper: Vertical Now.
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Teachers Tools
Tower Tube
As part of a grant-funded educational initiative, The Skyscraper Museum has published a teaching toolkit called Tower Tube. This FREE resource for New York City educators provides teachers with 14 enlarged images from the Museum's collection and friendly user-guide.
The Tower Tube is a tool kit for New York City teachers designed to enhance The Skyscraper Museum’s exhibitions and programs. The primary source materials and activity guide included will help teachers prepare students in NYC for a museum tour. In addition to serving as pre-and post visit materials, the Tower Tube supports classroom instruction on the following social studies concepts and themes:
• New York City history
• Skyscrapers and the development of the urban environment
• Community and neighborhood exploration
The Tower Tube holds a collection of historic images showing New York City skyscrapers, streets, and skylines. These resources – including PHOTOGRAPHS, DRAWINGS, and MAPS – are just a few of the museum’s rare artifacts that tell the story of skyscrapers and their unique place in the history and life of cities.
The Tower Tube Includes:
• 14 enlarged images from The Skyscraper Museum collection
• User manual with comprehensive information about each resource
• Teaching strategies for object-based inquiry
• Suggested activities for K-6 lessons and Secondary School activities
• Connections to New York State Regents Exam requirements and Learning Standards in Social Studies
Click here for a preview of the K-6 Tower Tube User's Guide.
Continue reading “Teachers Tools”…
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School and Camp Visits
The Museum visit incorporates learning from across the New York State curriculum, including science, mathematics, the arts, and social studies. Educators lead tours (up to 30 students) that allow students to interact with the Museum’s collections. Students leave with an appreciation of skyscrapers and their role in society as well as a better understanding of the methods of constructing tall buildings.
Scheduling
Educational guided tours of the current exhibition are available during non-public hours:
Monday & Tuesday, 10 AM to 6 PM
Wednesday – Sunday, 10 AM to 12 Noon
Cost
The Skyscraper Museum holds a NYC Department of Education Vendor Number.
$2.50 per Student; First three Instructors/Chaperones free, additional $5 each
$35 gallery fee for guided and self-guided tours during non-public hours.
Guidelines
The Skyscraper Museum does not have any facilities for students to eat their lunch. If the weather is pleasant, teachers may choose to bring their classes to Battery Park and its esplanade. Otherwise, classes may walk to nearby public spaces such as the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center.
Additionally:
There should be one chaperone for every ten students.
Students will be asked to leave their belongings in a secure place in the Museum before beginning the tour.
No food, drink, or gum is allowed in the gallery.
Students are expected to respect the Museum exhibits and staff.
To Schedule
To schedule a 40-minute tour,
Continue reading “Educational Resources”…
Book Talks & Lectures
Oral histories and film documentaries can be daunting projects that require the apparatus of library science and expert skill in grant-writing and persuasive fund-raising. Whether massive, multi-part series, intensely-focused portraits, or do-it-yourself videos, they capture images, interviews, and information that often would otherwise be lost.
An expert panel that includes both the makers and subjects of the films and videos will discuss the value of documenting stories of modern architecture and engineering. The program will feature a discussion, illustrated by excerpts from several documentaries: speakers include Leslie E. Robertson, subject of the 2018 film “Leaning Out – An Intimate Look at Twin Towers Engineer Leslie E Robertson,” James Sanders, co-writer of the Emmy Award-winning PBS series New York: A Documentary Film, architectural historian Annice Alt, who created a video interview of architect Richard Roth, and Museum Director Carol Willis. Richard Roth will join the discussion via Skype from his home in Florida.
Reservations are required, and priority is given to Members and Corporate Member firms and their employees.
Leslie E. Robertson
Leslie E. Robertson, one of the world’s leading structural engineers, collaborated closely with architects to create the innovative designs of the original World Trade Center, the U.S. Steel Tower in Pittsburgh, the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, Shanghai World Financial Center, and Lotte World Tower in Seoul. He retired as a partner in the firm Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA) at the end of 1994, continuing to work on LERA projects through 2012.
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School and Camp Visits
The Museum visit incorporates learning from across the New York State curriculum, including science, mathematics, the arts, and social studies. Educators lead tours (up to 30 students) that allow students to interact with the Museum’s collections. Students leave with an appreciation of skyscrapers and their role in society as well as a better understanding of the methods of constructing tall buildings.
Scheduling
Educational guided tours of the current exhibition are available during non-public hours:
Tuesday, 10 AM to 6 PM
Wednesday – Friday, 10 AM to 12 Noon
Cost
The Skyscraper Museum holds a NYC Department of Education Vendor Number.
$2.50 per Student; First three Instructors/Chaperones free, additional $5 each
$35 gallery fee for guided and self-guided tours during non-public hours.
Guidelines
The Skyscraper Museum does not have any facilities for students to eat their lunch. If the weather is pleasant, teachers may choose to bring their classes to Battery Park and its esplanade. Otherwise, classes may walk to nearby public spaces such as the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center.
Additionally:
There should be one chaperone for every ten students.
Students will be asked to leave their belongings in a secure place in the Museum before beginning the tour.
No food, drink, or gum is allowed in the gallery.
Students are expected to respect the Museum exhibits and staff.
To Schedule
To schedule a 40-minute tour,
Continue reading “School & Camp Visits”…
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History
Before the Permanent Home
The Skyscraper Museum, now located in a permanent gallery in Lower Manhattan, inhabited four temporary spaces from 1997 to 2003. The inaugural exhibition, DOWNTOWN NEW YORK, ran from April through December 1997 at 44 Wall Street, a vacant banking hall in New York's historic financial district. In 1998, the Museum moved to the historic (but since destroyed) Art Deco banking hall at 16 Wall Street in THE BANKERS TRUST BUILDING, where the Museum's second and third exhibits, BUILDING THE EMPIRE STATE (October 1998 through September 1999) and BIG BUILDINGS (October through December 1999) were mounted.
The Museum’s third location, from 2000-2001, was located in a commercial storefront at 110 Maiden Lane provided by Rudin Management. There we presented DESIGN DEVELOPMENT: TIMES SQUARE, featuring architectural models for six new Times Square towers. The gallery was closed after September 11th, 2001, when our space was used as an emergency information center to assist downtown businesses. From September 2001 to March 2004, the Museum was provided office space at 55 Broad Street, also by Rudin Management.
New Home Construction
In March 2004, The Skyscraper Museum opened its permanent home in a building at the southern tip of Battery Park City. The facility occupies ground-floor space in a mixed-use project that includes the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and a 38-story condominium tower. The Museum owns its space, which has been generously donated by Millennium Partners,
Continue reading “History”…
Book Talks & Lectures
Alice Alexiou’s marvelously written new book chronicles the story of the famous building that signaled the start of a new era in New York—and the unusual characters who played a part in its creation. Critics hated it. The public feared it would topple over. Passersby were knocked down by the winds. But even before it was completed, the Flatiron Building had become an unforgettable part of New York City. Built by the Fuller Company to be their New York headquarters, their president, Harry Black, was never able to make the public call it the Fuller Building. Head of the country’s largest real estate firm, Black made a fortune and lived out a high-profile, ostentatious life that led to divorce, collapse and at last, suicide.
The Flatiron chronicles not just the construction of the building, but the changing technology and culture that characterized New York at the dawn of the 20th century: Madison Square Park shifted from a promenade for rich women to gay prostitutes, photography became an art, motion pictures came into existence; jazz came to the forefront of popular music—all within steps of one of the city’s best-loved buildings.
Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Alice Sparberg Alexiou is the author of Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. She has been an editor of Lilith magazine and has written for The New York Times and Newsday, among others. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has a Ph.D.
