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.
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Intimate and engaging, Michael Rockland's rich narrative presents perspectives on the GWB that span history, architecture, engineering, transportation, design, the arts, politics, and the post-9/11 mentality. Stunning archival photos, from the bridge's construction in the late 1920s through the present, powerfully complement the account of competition between the GWB and the Brooklyn Bridge that parallels the rivalry between New Jersey and New York City. Rockland profiles the Swiss immigrant structural engineer Othmar Ammann and explains how the Depression dictated the iconic, uncovered steel beams of its towers so admired today. Tales of accidents, an airplane crash, and suicides off its span; the appearance of the bridge in media and the arts; and the author's own adventures scaling its massive towers on a cable animate the story of what Le Corbusier called "the most beautiful bridge in the world."
