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.
July 27, 2011 through January 2012.
SUPERTALL! is an international survey of superlative towers featuring projects that have been completed since 2001, are under construction, or are expected to top out by 2016. This recent generation of giants, generally 100 stories or higher, represents a new paradigm of slender mixed-use towers that explore innovative approaches in engineering, curtain-wall and construction technologies, energy efficiency and sustainability, and concepts of vertical communities.
January 12, 2011 through July 2011
Vertical Urban Factory features the innovative architectural design, structural engineering, and processing methods of significant factory buildings from the turn of the 20th century to the present. Now, over a century after the first large factories began to dominate our cities, the exhibition poses the question: Can factories present sustainable solutions for future self-sufficient cities?
April 21, 2010 through October 2010
The Rise of Wall Street charts the architectural evolution of one of the world's most famous locales. "Wall Street" is a broad metaphor for the American center for global finance, but it is also a real place with an inordinately rich history layered in every lot of its modest half-mile length, stretching from Trinity Church on Broadway to the East River.
An ambitious cycle of three exhibitions juxtaposes 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. 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 leads to an inquiry into the economics, laws, and culture shaping the present-day Chinese metropolises.
July 16, 2008 through June 14, 2009
Vertical Cities: Hong Kong | New York
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 was 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. October 24, 2007 through June 22, 2008
Centering on New York as the paradigm of the modern skyscraper city, the first exhibition analyzed 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.
