The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. 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. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
Installation Walkthrough
Shanghai today is a vast metropolis, physically transformed by the twin emblems of the modern city, high-rises and highways. In the historic core, Puxi, skyscrapers of 30 to 60+ stories have replaced traditional lane housing and low-rise neighborhoods. In the new district of Pudong, on the east side of the Huangpu River, a master plan dictates taller towers rising from open green space. The climax of the Pudong skyline is a trio of iconic supertalls: Jin Mao, Shanghai World Financial Center, and Shanghai Tower (2014), expected to reach 632 meters to become the tallest building in China and second tallest in the world.
The scale and speed of Shanghai's rise reproduces and even surpasses Manhattan's historic ascent in the early twentieth century. As the world's largest city in 1930, New York boasted a population of nearly 7 million and some 200 skyscrapers --more than all other cities combined at that time. Today, as high-rises proliferate everywhere, Hong Kong holds the title with 7,200. Still ascending, though, Shanghai is surely China's prophecy of the urban future.
