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, January 13, 2015 6:30-8 pm

David Smiley Book Talk

PEDESTRIAN MODERN: SHOPPING AND AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE, 1925-1956

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

In Pedestrian Modern, David Smiley reveals how the design for places of consumption—stores and shopping centers—informed emerging modernist tenets. Tracing the history of architecture’s relationship with retail environments during a time of significant transformation in urban centers and in open suburban landscapes, Pedestrian Modern expands and qualifies the making of American modernism.

David Smiley is an architect who teaches architectural and urban theory, design and practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Dr. Smiley has written on contemporary urban and suburban issues, large-scale urban interventions, the re-use of shopping malls and the recent history of urban planning and urban design in the Journal of Architectural Education, Perspecta, and the Journal of Urban History. He has taught at Yale University's School of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, and Texas A & M University.

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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.