The Skyscraper Museum is an architecture museum located in Battery Park City, Manhattan, New York City and founded in 1996. As the name suggests, the museum focuses on high-rise buildings as "products of technology, objects of design, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence." Before moving to the current and permanent location in Battery Park City in 2004, the museum was a nomadic institution, holding pop-up exhibitions in donated spaces around Lower Manhattan since 1996.
The Skyscraper Museum was founded and is directed by Carol Willis, a professor of architectural history and urban studies at Columbia University.
Move after September 11, 2001
The original site of the museum was located very close to the World Trade Center. After the September 11 attacks, the museum was forced to close temporarily as its space was commandeered as an emergency information center.
In March 2004, the museum reopened in its new permanent home in the neighbourhood of Battery Park City at the southern tip of Manhattan. The new site was designed by Roger Duffy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, working pro bono. The museum features stainless steel floors and exhibition areas meant to give the feeling of standing 40 stories in the air over a Manhattan street.
Selected exhibitions
On September 6, 2006, the museum opened an exhibit on the construction and history of the World Trade Center. The exhibit includes the original architectural/engineering model of the World Trade Center.
On June 24, 2009, the museum opened China Prophecy: Shanghai, a multi-media exhibition that examines Shanghai's evolving identity as a skyscraper metropolis. Featuring models of the major iconic structures, including Jin Mao, Tomorrow Square, Shanghai World Financial Center, and the new super-tall Shanghai Tower, as well as computer animations, film, drawings, and historic and contemporary photography of the city, the exhibition combines an in-depth look at the new generation of towers with an overview of the sweeping transformation of the city’s traditional low-rise landscape into a city of towers.
In 2011, the Skyscraper Museum opened a new exhibit called "Supertall!" dedicated to the tallest buildings in the world, those that stand at least 381 metres (1,250Â ft), the height of the Empire State Building. The exhibit features qualifying buildings built since 2001 to those that will be built by 2016 as a commemoration of and to demonstrate the irony of the recent popularity of the skyscraper in many countries, despite sentiment that after 9/11 there would be no more desire to live or work in or to build skyscrapers.
Besides in-house exhibitions, the museum also sponsors external shows and programs at various locations in the city. Additionally, the museum offers a unique virtual gallery through its website, which is an advanced 3-D archive of Manhattan skyscrapers.
See also
- List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City
Additional reading
- Filler, Martin (April 2015). New York: Conspicuous Construction. A discussion of Sky High and the Logic of Luxury - an exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum, New York City, October 2013 â€" June 2014. The New York Review of Books
References
External links
- Official website
- Online Virtual gallery
- Photos from the Shanghai exhibition opening
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