Presented by The Skyscraper Museum

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.

ROCKEFELLER CENTER @ 75
Tribute to a Miraculous Mega-project
Thursday, May 8

The Skyscraper Museum presents 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.

To register and for more information, click here

Re:NY Recycle | Retrofit | Reinvent the City
Lecture Series
February - April 2008

Recognizing the need for a great majority of New York's buildings to be modernized, but not replaced, the Museum will examine "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 on this programclick here

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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 current 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.

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)

Hearkening to the historical moment, Jim Rasenberger probes parallels between our time and America 1908. In this brand-new book, the author of High Steel: The Daring Men who Built the World’s Greatest Skyline explores a moment in American history filled with great optimism and hope for the future. “1908, by whatever quirk of history or cosmology, was one hell of a ride around the sun,” writes Rasenberger, shedding new light on familiar stories—from the Wright Brothers’ flight to Ford’s Model T, and of course, skyscrapers.

NOVEMBER 13
Suzanne Wasserman, Rebecca Lepkoff

Life on the Lower East Side: Photographs by Rebecca
Lepkoff, 1937-1950 (Princeton Architectural Press)

Rebecca Lepkoff’s photographs of the late 1930s and 1940s captured the dynamic and diverse life of the Lower East Side neighborhood bounded by the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and the Bowery to the East River. In this first collection of Lepkoff's work, historian and award-winning filmmaker Suzanne Wasserman will speak with Rebecca Lepkoff, discussing the rich texture and detail of both the photographs and the altered urban and social fabric of the continually changing Lower East Side.

OCTOBER 23
Alice Sparberg Alexiou

Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary (Rutgers University Press)

Alice Sparberg Alexiou provides the first biography of the late, great urbanist and author, Jane Jacobs, best known for her classic 1961 book Death and Life in Great American Cities. Drawing on interviews and an analysis of Jacobs’ writings, Alexiou traces the urban advocate’s life from Scranton, Pennsylvania to New York City and her beloved Greenwich Village, and eventually to Toronto, illuminating Jacob’s keen observations of city life that have influenced students of the city for more than four decades.

SEPTEMBER 18
David Friend
Watching the World Change (Picador)

Vanity Fair Editor David Friend's work is an examination of the iconic, appalling, and moving images from 9/11 and the week that followed. The terrorist attacks were the "most universally observed news event in human history." Friend will explore the nature of tragedy, image-making, and censorship in the age of digital media through a richly illustrated presentation.