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Founded in 1996, The Skyscraper Museum is a private, not-for-profit, educational corporation devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. Located in New York City, the world's first and foremost vertical metropolis, the museum celebrates the city's rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. Through exhibitions, programs, and publications, the museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence.
Learn more about the Museum's history, and our permanent home in Battery Park City.
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Education
Devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future, the Museum celebrates the city’s rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped Its successive skylines. With guided instruction, students and teachers can relate to tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate and places of work and residence. The Museum’s collection of archival photographs and architectural models inform and guide the educational experience.
The Museum is dedicated to progressive museum education and offers school visits which promote object-based inquiry and active exploration of our space. Using the New York State Learning Standards as a guide, lesson plans and instructional materials are designed to be academically rigorous and promote higher-order thinking. Our staff is trained to promote close looking and critical thinking during tours tailored for the curricular needs of teachers in the NYC Public School system.
Education at the Museum also extends to NYC teachers. The Museum offers professional development opportunities, in addition to meet & greet events held at the Battery Park City gallery.
Contact [email protected] to be put on our educators newsletter or call 212.945.6324 with further questions.
Resources
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Exhibitions
SKYLINE examined the emergence of the collective image of the skyline as the brand identity of New York and distinguished five periods in which new buildings grow and take characteristic forms based on economic, technological, and regulatory factors.
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On June 21, 2017, The Skyscraper Museum saluted, for the first time in its twenty-year history, the profession of structural engineering by honoring five firms with a long and proud legacy in creating New York City's skyline. Before a convivial crowd of more that 150, the Museum presented the 2017 Making New York History Award to leaders of the outstanding engineering companies:
DeSimone
Leslie E. Robertson Associates
Severud Associates
Thornton Tomasetti
WSP USA
* * *
After welcoming the many engineers and architects in attendance, Museum founder and director Carol Willis introduced trustee and Editor-in-Chief of Architectural Record, Cathleen McGuigan, who in turn introduced her colleague Janice Tuchman, Editor-in-Chief of ENR. Offering the champagne toast, Jan both poked fun at and praised "her people," the under-sung profession of structural engineers.
Presenting the awards to the individual firms was Skyscraper Museum board Chairman Jamie von Klemperer, a skyscraper architect and President of KPF, who recognized the firms' longevity in New York's high-rise history. After the five firms' representatives accepted the awards and shared praise for colleagues, a special recognition was awarded to Leslie E. Robertson for a lifetime of achievement in innovative engineering and design of classic modern structures.
Contributors
Benefactor
DeSimone Consulting Engineers
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates PC
Carol & Mark Willis
Platinum
Hilary Ballon
Related Hudson Yards
SL Green Realty Corp.
Thornton Tomasetti
Turner Construction
Gold
Alexandria Real Estate Equities,
Continue reading “2017: DeSimone, Leslie E. Robertson Associates, Severud Associates, Thornton Tomasetti, WSP USA”…
Exhibitions
The exhibition features the work of WOHA, the Singapore architects whose tropical towers, enveloped by nature, create vertical villages with sky gardens, breeze-ways, and elevated parks.
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Notable New Yorkers 2016
Making New York History Award
honoring
A. Eugene Kohn & William Pedersen
Founding Partners of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
At The Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Place
On the evening of June 22nd, 2016, The Skyscraper Museum honored A. Eugene Kohn and William Pedersen, founding partners of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, with the Museum's Making New York History Award which celebrates the outstanding individuals and companies who have shaped our city’s buildings, streets, and skyline. The occasion marked the 40th anniversary of the firm that Gene Kohn, Bill Pedersen, and Shelly Fox founded, auspiciously, on July 4, 1976.
More than 200 guests, including many architects, engineers, and developers who worked with Bill and Gene over the years gathered to toast their friends and colleagues. For more photos from the party click here.
The convivial program included warm remarks by Carol Willis, Founder and Director of The Skyscraper Museum, Cathleen McGuigan, Editor in Chief of Architectural Record and board member of The Skyscraper Museum, Stephen M. Ross, Founder and Chairman of Related, and James Von Klemperer, President of KPF and Chair of The Skyscraper Museum.
As a “Fourth of July” American firm, KPF has in recent decades exported its expertise and design philosophy to cities across the globe. Consistently viewing the commercial high-rise form as the “fundamental building block of the modern city,” KPF has created both signature towers and urban complexes that enliven and enrich cities worldwide.
Continue reading “2016: A. Eugene Kohn & William Pedersen”…
Exhibitions
Distinctive tops that add extra height to high-rises have been characteristic of New York skyscrapers from the first tall office buildings in the 1870s. The word skyscraper, after all, evokes both aerial height and a slender silhouette. The romance of Manhattan’s towers has been the inspiration and touchstone for a worldwide surge of signature tops.
TEN TOPS focuses on a group of the world’s tallest buildings: 100 stories and higher. TEN TOPS peers into their uppermost floors and analyzes the architectural features they share, including observation decks, luxury hotels and restaurants, distinctive crowns and night illumination, as well as the engineering and construction challenges of erecting such complex and astonishing structures.
Exhibitions
The first chapters in New York’s high-rise history were written in the 1870s through the early 1900s when the city’s great newspapers –the Times, Tribune, and World, among others– erected tall towers as signature headquarters. “Newspaper Row” on the east side of City Hall Park was center stage for their architectural competition and a concentrated hub of production, transforming news into newspapers. These early skyscrapers were both ostentatious advertisements of the papers’ self-proclaimed supremacy and vertical factories where on high floors, editors approved stories and compositors set type, while in the cellar and basement, steam engines or dynamos powered thundering presses that night and day rolled out tens of thousands of papers per hour.
Exhibitions
From colonial times, when the first bastions were erected to mark the edge of town, Wall Street has been continuously transformed, both in function—from commercial and residential to financial—as well as in scale. Row houses were replaced by low-rise banks, then massive high-rise office buildings. The skyscrapers that line Wall Street today represent the climax species of an intense urban process that the exhibit documents with graphics of successive buildings on a given site since 1850. These “Vertical Wall Street” images dramatically illustrate the cycles of growth that shaped the financial district over time, charting both the evolution from small to tall and the growing girth of buildings enabled by new technologies and slow, but savvy site assembly.
Exhibitions
Shanghai today is a vast metropolis of 18 million residents—the largest city in the world’s most populous nation. In just three decades, its population has nearly doubled, and the city has been physically transformed by the twin emblems of modernity—high-rises and highways. Formerly a horizontal expanse of dense and sprawling lilong neighborhoods, Shanghai has grown vertically. Nearly 400 high-rises of twenty stories or more were built in the historic core, Puxi, since 1990, and colossal elevated roads fly over old neighborhoods. In the new business district of Pudong on the east side of the river, a master plan dictates taller towers rising from open green space, culminating in a pair—soon to be a trio—of the world’s ten tallest skyscrapers. This is the third exhibition in the FUTURE CITY 20|21 cycle.
Exhibitions
Hong Kong, Asia’s Manhattan, is today an island of skyscrapers. Born of its deep-water harbor and constrained by its limited land and steep hillsides, the city expanded upward beginning in the 1970s, even surpassing the number of high-rises in New York in recent years. Driven by similar forces, the vertical development of Hong Kong and New York is compared in this exhibition through photography, film, architectural studies, and an analysis of the demographics and densities of the world’s most dramatic skyscraper societies. This was the second exhibition in the FUTURE CITY 20|21 cycle.
Exhibitions
As part of the FUTURE CITY 20|21 cycle of three exhibitions, NEW YORK MODERN looked back at prophecies of the skyscraper city in the early 20th century when the first dreams of a fantastic vertical metropolis took shape. From the invention of the tall office building and high-rise hotels in the late 19th century, New York began to expand upward, and by 1900, the idea of unbridled growth and inevitably increasing congestion was lampooned in cartoons in the popular press and critiqued by prominent architects and urban reformers.
Exhibitions
The ambition to erect the world’s tallest building is as old as the ages, and like the pyramids or gothic cathedrals, Burj Dubai is an epoch-defining tower and an architectural and engineering marvel that tackles unprecedented challenges of design and construction. The slender supertall represents the collective effort of ninety designers in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP and a team of consulting companies. The exhibition placed Burj Dubai in both the historical context of the competition for the world’s tallest building and in the contemporary arena of Dubai’s explosive growth.
Exhibitions
“GIANTS: The Twin Towers & the Twentieth Century,” commemorates the original World Trade Center, viewing its creation in the context of the technological ambitions of the 1960s and the hundred-year evolution of New York’s skyline.On their completion in 1971 and 1973, the Twin Towers were both the tallest and the largest skyscrapers in the world. Innovative engineering carried the structures to 110 stories, at 1362 and 1368 feet, and floors of nearly an acre multiplied the space of each tower into more than 4 million square feet. The scale of these giants has been exceeded only once in history, by the contemporary Sears Tower in 1974. By comparison, the Freedom Tower, the largest building planned for Ground Zero, will contain only 2.6 million square feet, about two-thirds of their volume.
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Notable New Yorkers 2006
MAKING NEW YORK HISTORY AWARD
Honoring environmentalist and developer
DOUGLAS DURST
and the Durst family
On Monday evening, May 8, The Skyscraper Museum honored Douglas Durst and the Durst family with the 2006 Making New York History Award. Two hundred guests attended the cocktail reception at the Museum’s Battery Park City home, where the exhibition “GREEN TOWERS for New York” provided a vivid illustration of The Durst Organization’s visionary leadership in green building design and development. Durst projects highlighted in the show include the pioneering Condé Nast Building @ 4 Times Square, the Helena Apartments, 125 W. 31st Street, and the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park.
From Left to Right: Alexander Durst, Anita Durst, Douglas Durst, Robert Fox, Carol Willis, James Hedden, Bruce Fowle, and Hal Fetner.
Offering toasts to a smiling Douglas Durst were a series of speakers, including Congressman Jerry Nadler, New School President Bob Kerrey (in absentia), architect Bruce Fowle of FXFOWLE, developer Hal Fetner of Sidney Fetner Associates, daughter and son Anita Durst and Alexander Durst, architect Robert F. Fox of Cook + Fox, builder Daniel R. Tishman (in absentia), and James Hedden, EVP, Commercial Real Estate Banking at Bank of America.
Also in attendance were NYC Commissioners Patricia Lancaster, Shaun Donovan, and Robert Tierney, and Diana Taylor, NYS Superintendent of Banks.
In the spirit of the classic compendium of prominent professionals, Notable New Yorkers of 1896-1899,
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Exhibitions
An exhibition that surveyed a new generation of skyscrapers recently completed or under construction in New York City that embraced sustainability and green building strategies as a central tenet of their design. Ranging from high-profile corporate headquarters to speculative office towers, and from “green” apartment blocks to mixed-use and institutional projects, these buildings represented a leading-edge of energy efficiency and environmental responsibility for high rise architecture in the U.S. today.
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Notable New Yorkers 2005
MAKING NEW YORK HISTORY AWARD
Father-and-son builders John and Dan Tishman were recognized on Wednesday, May 11th as The Skyscraper Museum presented its 2005 Making New York History Award. Held in the Museum’s gallery where the original 11-foot tall model of the World Trade Center model is on display, the event began as special guests offered toasts and recognized the Tishmans' unique historical connection to the Trade Center site.
Left to right: Dan Tishman, John Tishman, Larry Silverstein,
Carol Willis, and Les Robertson
Developer Larry Silverstein began the tributes, recalling his respect for the Tishmans as builders and owners and his own close association with John Tishman, dating back to 1984 and the construction of the first 7 World Trade Center, which along with the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11. “When we had to make a decision as to how to go forward with respect to a new site, the first person I reached out to was John’s son, Dan.” Silverstein spoke at length of the Tishmans’s constant “professionalism, integrity, knowledge, and experience.”
The Tishman legacy of construction was also praised by New School University President and former United States Senator Bob Kerrey who noted the Tishmans’ important role as great American builders.
New School University President and former US Senator Bob Kerrey
“I have a special place in my heart for men and women who build, who design, develop, and transform spaces from what they used to be into something grander,
Continue reading “2005: John and Dan Tishman”…
Exhibitions
The first comprehensive examination of the high-rise designs of America’s foremost architect examined Wright’s abiding interest in the re-invention of the tall building. Over the course of his long career, Wright designed a dozen high-rise buildings of which only two were built–the Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin (1944), and the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (1952-56). With these designs, Wright proposed a new structure for the skyscraper, challenged prevailing building practices with his use of materials, and proposed new directions in high-rise living.
Exhibitions
Through taking an unconventional look at high-rise size. The exhibition introduced Jumbo and Super Jumbo buildings, categories that describe size as measured by volume.
