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.

Hong Kong - Asia's Manhattan - is a city of seven million on the other side of the world. Born of a perfect harbor, like New York, it evolved from a colonial port into a dominant center of international finance and commerce. In both cities, skyscrapers became a principal instrument of economic growth and have multiplied into incomparable, iconic skylines. The urban dynamic of vertical density is a model that was established in Manhattan in the early twentieth century and has been reproduced in Hong Kong since the 1970s in extremis.

Today, Hong Kong surpasses New York in the number of high-rises, hyper-dense habitation, and efficient mass transit. Apartment towers commonly rise fifty to sixty stories or taller, even in surrounding new towns. Densities of 90,000 or more people per square mile - well above Manhattan's average of 70,000 - are typical. This exhibition examines Hong Kong's extreme urbanism: the crowded commercial core with its multi-level traffic and system of pedestrian bridges, its uniquely slender buildings, vertical shopping malls, massive housing estates, luxury apartments, and signature skyscrapers.

In its newest high-rise hubs, Hong Kong realizes aspects of the dreams of a rationalized city of towers that New York architects envisioned in the 1920s. VERTICAL CITIES explores these historical parallels, as well as the evolving identities of the world's most similar skyscraper societies.