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.
October 16 - 18, 2008
Registration will open September 2, 2008 for members of The Skyscraper Museum, RPA, all students, and New School faculty.
Registration will open October 1, 2008 for the general public.
All events are free, though space is limited.
In conjunction with the Vertical Cities: Hong Kong | New York exhibition, The Skyscraper Museum has organized an international symposium examining the dramatic vertical urbanism of Hong Kong and exploring comparisons with New York City. Three separate programs will be held in partnership with The Regional Plan Association, The New School's India China Institute and The Tishman Environment and Design Center.
There are two ways to conceptualize urban density: in the ground plane and in the skyline. Statistically, the world's densest major cities are Hong Kong, Cairo, Mumbai, and Manila - examples of wildly disparate models of urban development in the vertical and horizontal dimensions. New York has historically been the world's premier skyscraper city, but it has recently been eclipsed by Hong Kong in both the number of towers and average height of new buildings.
What is vertical density? Is it a product of rampant capitalist markets, of particular cultures, or can it be planned? Is it a positive goal for cities old and new? An international panel of architects, developers, planners, and government officials who have been responsible for many of Hong Kong's largest skyscraper and mixed-use projects discuss the private and public infrastructures that allow the city to function at its extreme levels of density. The vital role of mass transit infrastructure as a tool of urban planning, expansion, and concentration will be examined. Hong Kong's recent history shows that planned urban growth can accommodate the pressures to intensify central districts while creating commuter communities of dispersed, but remarkably dense housing estates of the outer districts and the New Territories.
Does Hong Kong's past three decades of vertical development echo the evolution of New York over the past century, or does it represent a new model? The programs explore past and future urban models of vertical density.
FOR WEB LINKS FOR PARTICIPANTS AND OTHER RESOURCES, click here.
Tentative Schedule of Events
On Wednesday, October 15, The Skyscraper Museum will host an opening reception and viewing of the
exhibition Vertical Cities: Hong Kong | New York.
Thursday, October 16:
LEARNING FROM HONG KONG
Location: To Be Announced
Co-sponsors: The Skyscraper Museum and The Regional Plan Association
3:00 - 5:30 PM: Presentations and Panel DiscussionUsing the Venturi and Scott-Brown model of Learning from Las Vegas, this program will examine Hong Kong's extreme density and development model of transit and towers and asks: What can New York learn?
This session will bring together the RPA's constituency of professionals in the business community, planners, public officials and academics for a high-level discussion of transit-based economic and urban development.
Hong Kong Model: Towers and Transit
Multi-level and Mixed-use: Urbane Urban Terminals
Case studies of the International Finance Center (IFC) and International Commerce Center (ICC) by the development and design teams.
Participants include:
Thomas Ho, Property Director, MTR Corporation, Hong Kong SAR
Christopher O. Ward, Executive Director, Port Authority of NY & NJ
Elliot Sander, Executive Director & CEO, MTA
Paul Katz, Partner and Principal, KPF
David Scott, Principal, Arup, New York; Chair, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat
Vishaan Chakrabarti, The Related Companies
Moderators:
Robert D. Yaro, President, RPA
Carol Willis, Director, The Skyscraper Museum
5:30 - 6:30 PM: Cocktail reception
*2.0 CEUs available
Friday, October 17:
DEBATING DENSITY
Location: Tishman Auditorium, The New School: 66 West 12th Street, 1st Floor
Co-Chairs:
Nicholas Brooke, Chairman, Professional Property Services Group, Hong Kong
Paul Katz, Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, New York
Carol Willis, Founder and Director, The Skyscraper Museum
2:00 - 5:30 PM: Panels and presentationDevelopers love density: urban activists generally decry it. Government officials try to find a balance between revenues generated by private development and the high costs of infrastructure and public amenities. Does density pay? Or does it cost?
Hong Kong and New York leaders from development, design and government will discuss the private and public infrastructures that allow the city to function at its extreme levels of density.
Housing at 250 Units an Acre: Hong Kong, Mass Market Private
Harbor, Heritage, and Hong Kong's Future
Sustainable Solutions
Nicholas Brooke, Chairman, Professional Property Services Group, Hong Kong
Robert Tierney, Chair, NYC Landmark Preservation Commission
Christine Loh, President and CEO, Civic-Exchange
Otto Poon, Chairman, Council for Sustainable Development, Hong Kong
Margaret Brooke, Convener, Heritage Hong Kong
Ian Hawksworth, Capital and Counties
5:30 - 6:30 PM: Reception
6:30 - 7:30 PM: Plenary speech
Mrs. Carrie Lam, Secretary for Development, The Government of the HKSAR, and dialogue with Amanda Burden, Chair, City Planning Commission and Director, NYC Department of City Planning
*3.0 CEUs available
Saturday, October 18:
DESIGNING DENSITY: THEORY AND PRACTICE
Location: Tishman Auditorium, The New School: 66 West 12th Street, 1st Floor
Co-chairs:
Ben Lee, Senior Vice President, The New School and Co-founder of the India China Institute (ICI)
at The New School; Professor of Anthropology and Philosophy, The New School for Social Research
Carol Willis, Founder and Director, The Skyscraper Museum
In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas admired Manhattan's "culture of congestion." Hong Kong has had the most densely-inhabited districts in the world, first by lack of regulation, then by design. An afternoon of discussion among academics and architects examines concepts of density and extreme urbanism in theory and practice.2:30 - 5:00 PM: Panel Discussion
Ackbar Abbas, Professor of Comparitive Literature, Hong Kong University and UC-Irvine
Peter Cookson Smith, Founding Director, Urbis, Hong Kong
Paul Chu, Convener, Hong Kong Urban Design Alliance
Laurence Liauw, Architect and Associate Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Brian McGrath, Associate Professor of Urban Design, Parsons School of Design
Eric Howeler, Principal, Howeler Yoon Architecture
Jim Robinson, Executive Director, HongKong Land
5:00 - 6:00 PM: Post-conference cocktail reception
*2.5 CEUs available
* * *
In addition to the symposium, receptions will be held, offering speakers and guests an opportunity
to meet their professional counterparts in a relaxed, intimate setting.
--- PAST PROGRAMS ---
ROCKEFELLER CENTER @ 75
Tribute to a Miraculous Mega-project
Thursday, May 8, 2008
The Skyscraper Museum presented a cavalcade of New York scholars and story-tellers to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the opening
of Rockefeller Center and its 70-story signature tower, the RCA Building/30 Rockefeller Plaza.
For more information and access to the virtual archive of the lecture, click here
Re:NY Recycle | Retrofit | Reinvent the City
Lecture Series
February - July 2008
Recognizing the need for a great majority of New York's buildings to be modernized, but not
replaced, the Museum examined "greening" the city by spotlighting a range of innovative
projects that feature landmark preservation, adaptive re-use, reinvented industrial sites, and
sustainable development.
For more information and access to the virtual archive of the lecture, click here
NEW YORK MODERN
Lecture Series
January - March 2008
Museum Director Carol Willis's first love and special focus of her academic research has
been American architecture of the 1920s. To expand the themes of the exhibition and
give definition to the concept of New York Modern, she presented a series of five lectures
that examined in detail the development of a new aesthetic in skyscraper design and ideas of
urban planning. For more information, click here.
Fall 2007 Programs
DECEMBER 12
Jim Rasenberger
America 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of
the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation. (Scribner)
NOVEMBER 13
Suzanne Wasserman, Rebecca Lepkoff
Life on the Lower East Side: Photographs by Rebecca
Lepkoff, 1937-1950 (Princeton Architectural Press)
OCTOBER 23
Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (Rutgers University Press)
SEPTEMBER 18
David Friend
Watching the World Change (Picador)
