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.
FUTURE CITY: 20 | 21
An ambitious cycle of three exhibitions will
juxtapose a retrospective of American visions of the skyscraper city of
the future from the early 20th century with an exploration of Chinese cities
today, principally Hong Kong and Shanghai, pursuing the parallel conditions
of rapid modernization and urbanization.
China Prophecy: Shanghai
June 24, 2009 through Winter 2010
Future City 20 | 21 culminates in a close look at Shanghai, as a model for 21st century urbanism. Using architectural photography of recent towers, architectural drawings of existing and proposed towers and computer animations, documenting both the recent high-rise developments and future plans for the next generation of Shanghai’s development, this installation will lead to an inquiry into the economics, laws, and culture shaping the present-day Chinese metropolises.
Vertical Cities: Hong Kong | New York
July 16, 2008 through June 14, 2009
Hong Kong, Asia's Manhattan, is today an island of skyscrapers. Born of its deep-water harbor and constrained by its limited land and steep hillsides, the city expanded upward beginning in the 1970s, even surpassing the number of high-rises in New York in recent years. Driven by similar forces, the vertical development of Hong Kong and New York is compared in this exhibition through photography, film, architectural studies, and an analysis of the demographics and densities of the world's most dramatic skyscraper societies. Click here for more information on Vertical Cities.
New York Modern
October 24, 2007 through June 22, 2008
Centering on New York as the paradigm of the modern skyscraper city, the first exhibition analyzes the predictions of the early 20th century in the work of leading architects and planners such as Hugh Ferriss, Raymond Hood, Harvey Wiley Corbett, and the Regional Plan Association, as well as science fiction imagery and futuristic films. Their schemes for monumental setback skyscrapers, elevated highways, and densely developed pedestrian precincts, such as the contemporary Rockefeller Center, demonstrate the optimistic urban dreams of the city’s first generation of skyscraper visionaries from the turn of the century into the 1930s.
