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.

Tuesday, February 13, 2018 6:30-8:00 pm

Alison Isenberg Book Talk

Designing San Francisco
Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay

Princeton University Press, 2017

Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. An evocative portrait of San Francisco between the 1940s and 1970s, the book focuses on the artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding the city as it underwent large-scale redevelopment. Join us as Alison Isenberg discusses a new paradigm for understanding past and present struggles to define an urban future, and compares and contrasts the well-known example of midcentury Manhattan (think Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs) with equally contentious San Francisco.

Alison Isenberg is Professor of History at Princeton University, where she codirects the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She is the author of Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It.

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.