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.

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Carol Willis, founder and curator of The Skyscraper Museum, is the author of the following books.

Form Follows
Finance (1995)

Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago
Princeton Architectural Press, 1995.

In contrast to standard histories that counterpose the design philosophies of the Chicago and New York "schools," Willis shows how market formulas produced characteristic forms in each city-"vernaculars of capitalism"-that resulted from local land-use patterns, municipal codes, and zoning.

Building the Empire
State (1998)

Building the Empire State
With essays by Carol Willis and Donald Friedman. Norton Books, 1998.

A re-discovered 1930s notebook charts the construction of the Empire State Building. You can make a tax-deductible contribution by donating Building the Empire State to the library of your choice.

Lower Manhattan
Plan (2002)

Lower Manhattan Plan
Carol Willis, editor. Essays by Ann Buttenwieser, Paul Willen and James Rossant. Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Representing the "1966 Vision for Downtown New York". This complete reprint of the original document has a new introduction by urban historian Ann Buttenwieser and a preface by Skyscraper Museum Director Carol Willis.