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.
Kathryn Holliday Book Talk
RALPH WALKER AND THE MAKING OF 1 WALL STREET
The great Art Deco tower of 1 Wall Street culminates architect Ralph Walker's 1920s skyscraper designs. More expensive and elaborate than his firm's many previous telephone and telegraph buildings, 1 Wall Street epitomized Walker's concept of “humanism,” a modern approach to the integration of hand-craft and machine work, expressed inside and out in the building’s rippling curtain walls and dramatically draped interior spaces.
Kate Holliday is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research focuses on American architecture and theory, particularly interactions with Europe. Her book Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age (W. W. Norton, 2008) won the 2008 Book of the Year Award from the southeast chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Rendering by Chester B. Price, 1930, courtesy of HLW International LLP
View Museum Director Carol Willis' introductory remarks to the talk
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The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
