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.
THANKS
TEN & TALLER is dedicated to our colleague, structural engineer and historian Donald Friedman, who for more than a decade poured through old engineering and real estate publications and city docket books to gather information on all new high-rise construction during the last quarter of the 19th century. Don’s interest lay in the structural systems employed in early high-rises, and the data he gathered formed the basis for his 2014 study Structure in Skyscrapers.
Our project inherited Don’s rich data and asked, “What happens if we map this?” More than 2,000 hours later, we had the beginning of an answer. TEN & TALLER visualizes Don’s comprehensive list of buildings and presents them by location, year, height, and use in order to understand the origins and urban development of Manhattan’s high-rise identity.
In addition to the Museum’s staff and interns, who deserve the greatest thanks for their long and hard work over more than a year on this project, we are grateful to many people who helped us out in various ways: Andrew Alpern, Mary Beth Betts, Andrew Dolkart, Al Guerra, Lee Gray, Chris Herrick, Jennifer Sainato, and Derek Trelstad.
For their foundational scholarship on late nineteenth-century high-rise architecture, we have greatly benefitted from the writings of Sarah Landau and Carl Condit, in The Rise of the New York Skyscraper, and of Robert A.M. Stern and his co-authors of the New York series. We also love Google Books, Internet Archive, and HathiTrust.
The web project of TEN & TALLER could not have been accomplished without the dedication of Josh Vogel, Nick Miller, Liz Volchok, and Jorge Orpinel, all of whom brought great enthusiasm and creative thinking to the project. For the exhibition, the Museum thanks them and all its hard-working staff and interns: Kat Collier, Rosy Doud, Rebecca Latto, Christine Ma, Alex Ritscher, Amanda Sarantos, Emma Thomas, and Michael Young, as well as our faithful installer Brian Zeeger.
Carol Willis
Founding Director and Curator
The Museum acknowledges the generous support of the Rudin Foundation, Inc., the Feil Family Foundation, and the J.M. Kaplan Fund for their longstanding commitment to our mission.
The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
