The Skyscraper Museum
Book Talks 2014
The Skyscraper Museum

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.




Barry Bergdoll Book Talk

Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson



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Partners in Design: Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Philip Johnson, a catalog that accompanies an exhibition opening in 2016 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, chronicles the collaboration of two key figures who in the 1920s and 1930s helped to establish the Museum of Modern Art and to introduce Modern Architecture – the European avant-garde movement that became known as the International Style – to New York and America. In this volume of essays edited by David A. Hanks, Barry Bergdoll, who himself served in the position of The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art from 2007-2013, examines the context of New York’s architectural cultures in the late Twenties and the catalytic role of the 1932 MoMA exhibition curated by Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock, called Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.

Architectural historian Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University, where he studied as an undergraduate, received his PhD., and has taught since 1986, specializing in modern architecture and culture in the broadest sense. The author of numerous books, articles, and distinguished lecture series, Bergdoll spent six years, through 2013, as the Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, during which time he organized and curated a series of influential exhibitions, ranging from the contemporary inquiries "Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront" and "Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling," to scholarly surveys of the works of Henri Labrouste and Le Corbusier, as well as the 2015 "Latin America in Construction: 1955-1980."


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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.