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.

EXHIBITIONS OVERVIEW

CHINA PROPHECY: SHANGHAI

CURRENT Shanghai today is a vast metropolis of 18 million residents--the largest city in the world's most populous nation. In just three decades, its population has nearly doubled, and the city has been physically transformed by the twin emblems of modernity--high-rises and highways. Formerly a horizontal expanse of dense and sprawling lilong neighborhoods, Shanghai has grown vertically. Nearly 400 high-rises of twenty stories or more were built in the historic core, Puxi, since 1990, and colossal elevated roads fly over old neighborhoods. In the new business district of Pudong on the east side of the river, a master plan dictates taller towers rising from open green space, culminating in a pair--soon to be a trio--of the world's ten tallest skyscrapers.

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.
NEW YORK MODERN	2008 OCTOBER-JUNE As part of the FUTURE CITY: 20 | 21 cycle of three exhibitions, NEW YORK MODERN looked back at prophecies of the skyscraper city in the early 20th century when the first dreams of a fantastic vertical metropolis took shape. From the invention of the tall office building and high-rise hotels in the late 19th century, New York began to expand upward, and by 1900, the idea of unbridled growth and inevitably increasing congestion was lampooned in cartoons in the popular press and critiqued by prominent architects and urban reformers.
WORLD'S TALLEST BUILDING: BURJ DUBAI	2007 APRIL-OCTOBER The ambition to erect the world's tallest building is as old as the ages, and like the pyramids or gothic cathedrals, Burj Dubai is an epoch-defining tower and an architectural and engineering marvel that tackles unprecedented challenges of design and construction. The slender supertall represents the collective effort of ninety designers in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP and a team of consulting companies. The exhibition placed Burj Dubai in both the historical context of the competition for the world's tallest building and in the contemporary arena of Dubai's explosive growth.
GIANTS: Twin Towers & The Twentieth Century	2006-2007 This exhibit commemorated the original World Trade Center, viewing its creation in the context of the technological ambitions of the 1960s and the hundred-year evolution of New York's skyline. The exhibition featured architectural and engineering models, construction photographs and films, drawings and other documents addressing the planning and design on the complex. The multimedia installation included video and audio clips, as well as interactive touch-screens that allowed visitors to view hundreds of construction photographs in the Museum's collection and to see and hear interviews of key figures in the Trade Center's design and development.
GREEN TOWERS FOR NEW YORK	2006 JANUARY-AUGUST An exhibition that surveyed a new generation of skyscrapers recently completed or under construction in New York City that embraced sustainability and green building strategies as a central tenet of their design. Ranging from high-profile corporate headquarters to speculative office towers, and from "green" apartment blocks to mixed-use and institutional projects, these buildings represented a leading-edge of energy efficiency and environmental responsibility for high rise architecture in the U.S. today.
FAVORITES	2005-2006 What are your Top Ten favorite New York skyscrapers? That question was posed in a Skyscraper Museum survey completed by an invited list of 100 knowledgeable New Yorkers and building industry professionals, including architects and engineers, developers, brokers, builders, historians, and critics. The results were seen in this exhibition.
CITY OF CHANGE	2004-2005 City of Changes explored the role of the skyscraper in shaping the identity and character of downtown's streets and skyline in The Skyscraper Museum's exhibition running from January through August, 2005. Linking past, present, and future, the exhibit examined the construction of the World Trade Center and the rebuilding at Ground Zero and highlighted the new construction and residential conversions underway throughout the district.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: VERTICAL DIMENSION	2004-2005 The first comprehensive examination of the high-rise designs of America's foremost architect examined Wright's abiding interest in the re-invention of the tall building. Over the course of his long career, Wright designed a dozen high-rise buildings of which only two were built--the Johnson Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin (1944), and the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (1952-56). With these designs, Wright proposed a new structure for the skyscraper, challenged prevailing building practices with his use of materials, and proposed new directions in high-rise living.
THE ORIGINAL YAMASAKI WORLD TRADE CENTER MODEL	2004-2006 Just six blocks south of Ground Zero, The Skyscraper Museum opened an exhibition on the World Trade Center that featured the original model created for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey by the architect Minoru Yamasaki.
THE VIEWING WALL AT GROUND ZERO	2002-2003 The Skyscraper Museum commemorated the anniversary of 9/11 on September 10, 2002 by erecting a Viewing Wall at Ground Zero. This would be the first of two walls. The second wall was completed in September 2003. The design of each wall consided of a screen-like grid of galvinzed steel, that allowed visitors to see into the Trade Center site as well as carry a series of large fiberglass panels that featured information on the buildings and rebuildings, the history of lower manhattan. Special alcoves of recessed bays contained panels with all the names of the victims of September 11, 2001.
WTC:MONUMENT	2002 The following site is a tribute to the Twin Towers, examining the history of the complex in its conception, design, and construction from the 1960s through the mid-1970s -- and their destruction on the morning of 9/11.
DESIGN DEVELOPMENT: TIMES SQUARE	2000-2001 Inspired by the popularity of the museum's 2000 spring lecture series, Times Square Now, the installation explored the interactions of design and development by showing the evolution of the building form through multiple study models.
BIG BUILDINGS	1999 OCTOBER-DECEMBER Through taking an unconventional look at high-rise size. The exhibition introduced Jumbo and Super Jumbo buildings, categories that describe size as measured by volume.
BUILDING THE EMPIRE STATE	1998-1999 Examined the design and construction of New York's signature skyscraper, drawing together photographs and film of the construction, architectural and engineering drawings, contracts, builders' records, financial reports, and other artifacts.
DOWNTOWN NEW YORK	1997 APRIL-DECEMBER On May 1, 1997, The Skyscraper Museum opened a major exhibition on the architecture and urbanism of Lower Manhattan in donated space, a vacant banking hall at 44 Wall Street, a 1926 skyscraper in the heart of New York's financial district.