Skyscraper Museum

[NYguy]

Downtown Express...

Construction gets underway at Skyscraper Museum

By Jane Flanagan

What is touted as the world’s first permanent skyscraper museum is coming to Lower Manhattan – to the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Battery Park City.

The fact that there will be one at all is due, by all accounts, to the dogged determination of a Columbia architectural history professor, Carol Willis, the founder and director of The Skyscraper Museum.

“She had a vision and she persevered,” said her husband Mark Willis.

Persevered is an understatement. For seven years Willis labored under such formidable tasks as dealing with New York City real estate moguls, enlisting pro-bono help from acclaimed architects and designers, fundraising and construction.

What made one college professor willing to do this?

An unabashed passion for skyscrapers.

Her journey to the permanent museum at the Ritz, which is expected to open at the end of October, began in 1995 at a book signing. Willis, now 54, had just published her book, “Form Follows Finance,” which chronicled the history of New York and Chicago skyscrapers. It grew out of a seminar she was teaching at Columbia. Willis made an announcement to the gathering.

“She said we need a skyscraper museum. And I am going to build it,” said Mark, her husband of more than 30 years. “She had no idea how to do it. She learned. And it was a lot of work,” he said.

Judging from the roster of luminaries who attended a construction kick-off party last week it certainly was. Present were: James Gill, chairperson of the Battery Park City Authority, C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president, Kate Levin, Cultural Affairs commissioner, Councilmember Alan Gerson, Philip Aarons, founding partner of Millennium Partners, the developer of the Ritz building who is donating the museum space and Daniel Tishman, chairperson of Tishman Construction, which is doing the construction pro bono.

Tishman referred to Willis’ tenacity.

“She pushed us and pushed us. And we said ‘enough.’ But we kept getting pushed,” he said with a laugh.

Willis opened a vagabond version of the museum in 1997, shuttling a growing collection of photographs and artifacts to several makeshift headquarters – all of them Downtown, including 44 Wall St., 16 Wall St. and 110 Maiden La.

“I always knew it should be Downtown,” said Willis. “Lower Manhattan is the birthplace of the skyscraper.”

In the early part of the 20th century, Lower Manhattan boasted several of the tallest buildings in the world – including the Woolworth Building which was the tallest from 1913 until the late 1920s.

Skyscrapers are also intrinsically American, she said.

“They are America’s great contribution to architecture,” she said. “We have pyramids, cathedrals, palaces and skyscrapers.”

The Financial District is also appropriate because the towering buildings are inextricably linked to ambition and high finance, she said.

“The skyscraper is about aspiration and ego,” said Willis. “It’s all about money.”

But for her, it’s certainly not about money. For the first four years she did not take a salary. Now she takes a half salary. Willis, who chose her Chelsea apartment because of its unobstructed views of the World Trade Center, said it’s about skyscrapers.

The 5,800 square-foot museum will be located at the rear ground level of the Ritz Carlton, at the south end of Battery Park City. It will likely attract a large number of visitors. Since Sept. 11, and the architectural competition to design the new World Trade Center, the interest in skyscrapers has surged. The museum’s Web site, skyscraper.org now gets 600,000 visits a year, she said, more than double what it was before.

The museum’s exhibits, housed in individual, tall columns, will be bathed in light that will reflect off a stainless steel floor producing a towering image evocative of skyscrapers. The first exhibit will include a 500-picture album on the building of the Empire State Building. Next summer, 2004, there will be an exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright.

While the permanent museum will soon be a reality, it’s unlikely Willis will slack off anytime soon. In thanking Philip Aarons, the Millennium founder, for donating the space, Willis said, “They have given us a rent-free lease for 67 years. And we hope they renew it after that.”

http://www.downtownexpress.com/DE_08/museum.jpg
Carol Willis shows visitors The Skyscraper Museum space last week. It is scheduled to open in October.

[NYguy]

More Skyscraper Museum...

http://www.som.com/resources/projects/3/4/3/interiorboth_1118.jpg
http://www.som.com/resources/projects/3/4/3/sidewalkboth_1120.jpg
http://www.som.com/resources/projects/3/4/3/interiorright_1119.jpg
http://www.som.com/resources/projects/3/4/3/skscraperbaxon_1121.jpg
http://www.som.com/resources/projects/3/4/3/skyscraperp_1122.jpg

[ablarc]

Great idea for a museum. Looks like a pretty nice design, too.

Seems to me skyscrapers break themselves down a little more naturally into five groups than the three selected:

1. The Ancients: Chicago School flattops culminating in Flatiron.

2. Beaux-Arts: Singer, woolworth, MetLife, Municipal Bldg., all the way to Helmsley.

3. Deco Classics: Empire State, Chrysler, RCA et al.

4. International Style flattops, which incidentally start before Seagram and Chase, viz. United Nations.

5. Post-Modern sculptural set pieces liberated from most constraints of style or structural expression. Pure form?



I know I'll get a lot of arguments on this one.

[DominicanoNYC]

That's a great idea with a modern look. What took them so long to come up with this.

[dbhstockton]

ablarc, it's broken down by major revisions of NYC's zoning laws, which, in the end, have had more of an influence on Skyscraper design than stylistic trends. *A simpler and much more objective criteria for a museum.

[Kris]

Pseudo-scientific.

[ablarc]

dbhstockton, are you sure it isn't the other way around: the zoning revisions codify the stylistic trends? Didn't the zoning that produced the 6th Avenue tombstones come out of a desire to do freestanding objects in plazas? And isn't this a stylistic notion, based on modernist theorists such as Corbu, Mies and Wright?

And anyway, wouldn't Jack Robertson's zoning revisions qualify as major?: they produced the Times Square skyscrapers, which have not much in common with their neighbors on 6th Avenue, and yet they are lumped into one category.

Objectivity has its limitations; sometimes it can make you completely lose sight of reality.

Anyway, you'd think an art historian would be interested in style.

[Kris]

February 29, 2004

A Tiny Museum Achieves Its Towering Ambition

By JULIE V. IOVINE

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/02/29/arts/iovine.184.450.jpg
Carol Willis, the curator of the Skyscraper Museum, stands in a window inside the museum's new building in downtown Manhattan. At left, "the city of skyscrapers," as a postcard circa 1912 calls it.

For most people skyscrapers are just part of the visual furniture that makes New York New York. For Carol Willis, they are infinitely more: "the most important contribution of American culture to the history of architecture," she says, and an important ingredient in Manhattan's heady cocktail of pride, ambition and glamour. It's something she feels on such a personal level that she chose her current apartment largely for one reason: it has a prime view of the Empire State Building.

Over the last eight years, Ms. Willis, 55, an architecture historian and professor of urban studies at Columbia University, has turned that personal obsession into a public mission. "New York is the pre-eminent skyscraper city," she said, sitting in her lower-Manhattan office surrounded by two huge aerial photographs of the neighborhood before and after the World Trade Center was built. "We are synonymous with the skyscraper, and our image in the world is a skyline."

It seemed obvious to her that there ought to be a museum about them. With no money, no location and nothing to put in such a museum, Ms. Willis somehow or other managed to line up a star architect to design it, a luxury developer to donate a space and even a promise from the American Institute of Architects to lend the original World Trade Center model as the centerpiece of the collection-to-be.

On April 2, the Skyscraper Museum will open to the public. (A curtain-raising party is scheduled tomorrow.) But the institution will convey an additional message Ms. Willis could never have envisioned when she began her quest in 1995.

Since that time, of course, the meaning of skyscrapers — and in particular, the resonance of the lower-Manhattan skyline — has changed forever. No longer mere symbols of ambition and triumph, they now also inspire a sense of vulnerability, fear and mortality. And lest anyone overlook that complication, the museum is situated just a few blocks from the open wound where the twin towers once stood.

Skyscrapers have always had a complex story to tell, according to Ms. Willis. The museum will not treat them as relics, or some musty historic collection gathered for the amusement of old-timers. "I'm a person who cares about the present and the future," she said, adding that the first exhibition will concentrate on both the heroic skyscrapers of the 1920's and the new stars now rising in Asia. "l want to make the argument that the subject of skyscrapers is current."

Although tucked out of the way at the far end of West Street behind the new Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the museum is anything but retiring. With both floors and ceilings sheathed in smooth steel polished to a mirror finish, the interior creates a purposefully dazzling effect that its architect, Roger Duffy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, calls "vertical Versailles."

In the reflective surfaces overhead and underfoot, the single gallery space and everything in it, from tall back-lighted vitrines to a visitor's high-heeled boots, looks impossibly elongated. Physically the space is rather small, at 5,000 square feet. The ceilings are just over 11 feet high. But the effect, as Mr. Duffy explained, is an expansive illusion of volume and even a bit of "that arresting feeling of seeing skyscrapers for the first time."

Just inside the entrance, the donors' names are etched — in a Star Wars-style scroll — on the ceiling. A mirrored ramp, lined with blowups of skyscraper postcards and World Trade Center construction photos, leads up to the exhibition space.

Two weeks before the opening party, the mirrored floor remained under a protective coating. (Ms. Willis and her colleagues are still deciding whether to require visitors to don felt booties, to maintain the shine.) Only in patches was it possible to get a sense of the effect to come. Just as Ms. Willis was trying to explain how the 11-foot showcases would look many times taller when reflected, a construction worker — yellow magnetic ruler in hand, gold rings in ear — interrupted to ask if it would be possible to see up women's skirts. "Yes, definitely," Ms. Willis answered with a shrug. "Then I guess it's going to be a really popular place," he replied.

Visitors to the museum will discover voyeuristic views of another sort as well: the history of the city, with the top layer peeled back revealing the men, materials and even the minutiae of the leasing deals that went into building its mighty structures.

Ms. Willis's theory is that skyscrapers represent a kind of urban flowering. When conditions are just right — banks are lending, developers are competing, zoning is generous and the economy is rosy — they bloom. The glory days of the New York skyscraper were between 1912 and 1930, when the skyline, especially downtown, sprouted stunners like the Woolworth Building with its flamboyantly Gothic masonry, Cities Service (now at 70 Pine Street) with its illuminated glass spire and, moving north, the Chrysler Building with those shiny steel epaulets.

Ms. Willis pointed to a large photograph of two men sliding a carved limestone panel into place on a section of the Empire State Building. "In its day, the Empire State Building was the most efficient building ever built," she said. "Everything was delivered to the site ready to go. It took 11 months to build; the same time it took for the Chrysler Building even though, at two million square feet, the Empire State Building was twice as large."

At the moment such construction photographs make up the bulk of the museum's collection. Among the most precious is a binder of progress photos with handwritten notations documenting the construction of the Empire State Building. It was donated by the Starrett family, whose company oversaw construction. Other treasures include a chunk of an early composite I-beam, from the 1890's, and countless documents that Ms. Willis scrounged from the archives of buildings that were about to be sold. But the focus will be less on amassing golden-age artifacts than on telling stories in order to understand how cities take shape.

How Ms. Willis pulled it off is a story all its own. Flying around from appointment to appointment on a flea-market Schwinn, her wispy blond hair crammed into a helmet, she began by talking to anyone who would listen. Lecturing on how economic forces and zoning laws carved the distinctive spires of the earliest skyscrapers, she made an ally in the architect David Childs, who says he was dazzled by "her passion and knowledge." That connection led to a host of experts willing to work pro bono, including an engineer, a construction company and even the graphic design group Pentagram.

Mr. Childs also introduced Ms. Willis to Mr. Duffy, who is his colleague at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. "She didn't have anything," Mr. Duffy recalled of their first meeting at the Grand Central Terminal Oyster Bar. "There was no program, no money. She just looked really determined." He happily signed on. He would be donating his labors, she told him, but he would have complete artistic freedom. Both figured it would take a year.

Finding a home was actually easier. In the late 90's there was plenty of unoccupied downtown space, which developers were happy to contribute, at least until the market picked up.

With ink barely dry on a lease with a 30-day cancellation clause, the Skyscraper Museum opened in 1997 at 44 Wall Street, a 1926 tower decked out in the 1960's with white marble columns. It stayed there barely a year before moving on to 16 Wall Street, an Art Deco beauty. The museum lasted there for one and a half years, attracting some 20,000 visitors, before the building was sold and Ms. Willis and her staff of three had to pull up stakes and move off the beaten path to 110 Maiden Lane.

Sept. 11 shut that location down, but within three months, Ms. Willis had managed to mount a show on the twin towers and their construction that ran for four months at the New York Historical Society.

A deal with Donald Trump at the historical gem 40 Wall Street fell through, but by then Ms. Willis was already negotiating with the Battery Park City Authority and the Millennium Partners, a high-end developer with an interest in the project. The Skyscraper Museum would be the required public amenity included in the developer's bid to develop a site on the southernmost block of Battery Park City In September 2002, Ms. Willis signed a 67-year rent-free lease for 5,000 square feet on the ground floor on the backside of what became the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Of the $3 million needed for construction, half came through public monies: $1 million from the city and $500,000 from the Battery Park City Authority. The developers Larry Silverstein and Jerry Speyer have each given $100,000. In addition, Ms. Willis, who worked without pay for four years, and her husband, Mark, an executive at J. P Morgan Chase, have donated $100,000, she said.

A capital campaign is under way to raise $10 million more, including $2.5 million for an endowment. While some critics wonder if Ms. Willis, whose credentials are primarily academic, would be better served by a professional fund-raiser, Mr. Duffy has no doubts about her ability to get the most out of people. He didn't even keep track of the time he spent volunteering for her project. "I found myself working as hard for her as I do for real clients," he said. "She demands attention and she gets it."

But raising money and attracting visitors are different matters. It's not self-evident what the audience for a museum like this might be in the New York of 2004. The heyday of the city's skyscrapers, maybe even the country's skyscrapers, had ended before 9/11. The race to build the tallest building is being run in Asia and the Middle East now. Even London is building more skyscrapers at the moment than almost any city in the United States.

"In America, there's almost an attitude of `been there, done that,' " said Ron Klemencic, the chairman of the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. "They're just not as compelling for us as they are for a country trying to show that their world economy has arrived."

Ms. Willis said that she expects to see a lot of tourists, especially from Germany, France and Japan, where the appetite for stories about both Manhattan's martini years and large-scale construction is large. And there will also be tour programs for school children and professional groups.

In the end, however, the museum, with its seductive mirrored floors, really is meant to be a tease. Or as Mr. Duffy said, "The museum is just a prelude, the real museum is the city itself."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

www.skyscraper.org

[BigMac]

I will make the museum one of my first stops the next time I am in the city. I'm glad such a museum exists, as it focuses on a major part of New York City's identity. Hopefully the museum will be an impetus for developers in the city to once again fearlessly reach for the sky, and catch up with Asia and the Middle East in the skyscraper race.

[NYguy]

Just a reminder, hopefully the museum will be opening by the end of the week...

[krulltime]

So is it open yet? I went to the website and says it is open but I am not sure...has anyone been there yet? :?:

[NYguy]

Newsday....

The sky's the limit for new downtown museum

The Associated Press
April 2, 2004

It may be a small space, but it deals with some mighty big subjects.

After half a dozen years in temporary locations, the Skyscraper Museum opened its doors Friday in its new permanent home in lower Manhattan.

The 5,800-square-foot, ground floor gallery is walking distance from the World Trade Center site and the fallen twin towers that were at one time the tallest buildings in the world.

The museum, which shares the same building as the Ritz-Carlton hotel, was always intended to be in lower Manhattan since its first exhibition in 1997, said Carol Willis, founder and director.

"Lower Manhattan is the birthplace of the skyscraper," she said. "The skyline of lower Manhattan from New York Harbor was the image of New York for much of the 20th century. ... Lower Manhattan is the most appropriate and the most poignant place to tell the story."

The gallery space itself was designed to look modern, and uses a visual trick to expand the look of the place. The ceiling and floor are made of a highly polished stainless steel, which reflect each other and make the gallery seem that much taller.

The opening exhibit is "Building a Collection." It includes photos, drawings, models, books and other items to showcase the construction and history of skyscrapers. One wall has drawings of current and planned buildings, to show the future of the tall buildings.

They include images of the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, Taipei 101, the world's tallest skyscraper at 1,676 feet, and plans for the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower to be built at the reconstructed World Trade Center site.

This summer, the museum will host an exhibit on the World Trade Center, featuring an original model of the site, and in October, a show focusing on the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright.

On the Net: Skyscraper Museum: http://www.skyscraper.org

Take a virtual tour
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/nyc-skyvideo,0,1402731.realvideo?coll=nyc-swapbox-homepage


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-04/12073872.jpg


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http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-04/12072911.jpg


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-04/12072839.jpg

[BigMac]

Good pictures NYguy; thanks for the update on the museum.

[NYguy]

No problem. I am very intrigued by those skyscraper models, including the different Freedom Tower designs (although I'm sure it will make me like the current design less)...


http://www.skyscraper.org/Pics/opening_675.jpg

Museum hours are 12-6 PM, Wednesday-Sunday. General admission is $5, $2.50 for students and seniors.

[Kris]

April 3, 2004

Trolling for Visitors Interested in Heights

By MICHAEL BRICK

Slide Show: The Skyscraper Museum (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2004/04/02/nyregion/20040403_SKYS_SLIDESHOW_1.html)

The publicists did all they could, procuring jugs of expensive take-out coffee, assembling seven single-spaced pages of probably very informative prose, offering a preview, smiling prettily and making introductions.

But by noon yesterday, the object of all their publicizing, the new Skyscraper Museum on the downtown Manhattan waterfront, had to stand on its own as it opened to the public in a dedicated space after nearly seven years of impermanence.

Fortunately for the publicists, the museum is in a city known for infrastructure fetishists of all types. So it stood to reason that there might be an audience of hard-core enthusiasts of really tall buildings, primed for the grand opening.

Instead, the first of the dozen or so early visitors were one Hiroshi Morimoto, an auto industry worker from Japan, his wife and their teenage children. Richard Kielar, one of the publicists, confessed to having personally lured the Morimotos to the museum from the subway.

"I said, 'Why don't you come to the Skyscraper Museum?' " Mr. Kielar said. "There was a bit of a language thing. I said, 'Freedom Tower.' They said, 'O.K.' "

Mr. Morimoto gave Mr. Kielar his business card, then moved along. His children had expressed an interest in finding Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, who are not likely to visit the Skyscraper Museum together, and Mr. Kielar suggested they try the video screens in Times Square.

The museum, at 39 Battery Place, is itself something to see, even for those without any interest in really tall buildings. The back wall is decorated with old pictures of construction workers, who, judging from the goofy grins on their faces, were posing in positions of hard labor.

The whole thing is contained in a single room with an antechamber and a ramp that slopes up through the exhibition space, where photographs, sketches, postcards, promotional materials and other arcana about really tall buildings are displayed. There are mirrors on the ceiling and on the floor, like a sideways carnival funhouse, and this scheme succeeds in giving the floor-to-ceiling exhibition cases the illusion of infinite height and depth.

As it turned out, the nonobsessive general public dominated the group. Victor Solis and Laura Villaseñor, from Mexico City, emphasized that they were "not especially interested in architecture, or anything."

Within minutes of the opening, a not exactly obsessed but certainly keenly interested man named Chase W. Rynd showed up. He made no attempt to conceal his affiliation with a seeming competitor; he is the executive director of the National Building Museum in Washington.

Was he spying, perhaps?

No. He was unthreatening and sincere. In fact, he said, he was thinking that maybe the two museums could collaborate.

After a walk through the museum, Mr. Rynd pronounced the place "appealing to anybody who's been near a skyscraper. People from Antarctica may not relate."

He was right: No one from Antarctica even bothered to show up, but this slight did not seem to worry the publicists. There was Beate Helmes from Germany, and Vincent Shaw of Manhattan, who did not even realize that yesterday was opening day.

Far and away the most excited visitor was Grant Glovin, 10, escorted by his family's au pair, Rebecca Graham, 19. Grant, who had spent the morning at the Transit Museum feeding his train obsession, set to work developing a sideline fascination with really tall buildings. The tallest he has personally visited, to the best of his one-decade recollection, was the World Trade Center.

Grant and Ms. Graham briefly inspected their reflections on the floor, discussed the funniness of so many people working on a building at once, then submitted to a game of Give the Publicists a Heart Attack, wherein a newspaper reporter strolls past the expensive coffee, stuffs the pages of informative papers into a coat pocket, drops to one knee and asks a 10-year-old boy whether or not the museum is worth a visit.

"It's pretty informative," Grant declared. "It's pretty amazing that they crammed this much information into this space, which isn't really that big. It just gives you the illusion that it is."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYguy]

I went by the museum today. That floor takes some getting used to. The trick with the mirrors gives the sensation that there's a floor below, which you'll be crashing into at any step. Its's a nice museum, and basic exhibit for the opening. There were more people there than I had expected, so I didn't spend a lot of time at the exhibits, most of which centered on New York's early skyscrapers (like Empire, Woolworth, Rockefeller Center). There's also WTC with video coverage and a huge photo of the NY Times tower that I would love to have (can't wait for that one to start). The exhibit also showcased a few modern scrapers, such as T101, Petronas, Jin Mao, and SWFC.

I only grabbed a few photos, and forgot to change my camera settings. As a result, the pictures are dark, but you get the idea...

Here's a pic of Childs' past working designs of the Freedom tower

http://www.pbase.com/image/27581984/large.jpg


A look at the SWFC that may or may not be built...

http://www.pbase.com/image/27581988/large.jpg

[Kris]

Skyscraper Museum Opens in Lower Manhattan

April 2, 2004

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/images/040402skyscraper1.jpg

After years of borrowing space, the Skyscraper Museum - dedicated to exploring the history and the future of the tall building - finally opened its own facility today.

Located inside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the southern tip of Manhattan, the one-story space, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, looks much taller, thanks to mirrored stainless steel ceilings and floors. The reflective spaces are designed, notes SOM partner Roger Duffy (who collaborated with artist James Turrell), to look like "you're above a city street, 40 stories up."

Moving through the museum, one first approaches drawings, articles, materials and photos of some of the earliest skyscrapers, like the Woolworth Building, the Washington Life Building, and the Singer Building, all built at the beginning of the 20th century. Next come textured presentations of skyscrapers' recent past, like the Sears Tower in Chicago and, of course, the World Trade Center in New York. Finally arrives at large boards presenting recent and future height behemoths like the current height champion, the Petronas Towers, the Conde Nast Building in New York, the upcoming Taipei 101 in Taiwan, Jin Mao Building and Shanghai World Financial Center in Shanghai, and Hearst Tower in New York.

The museum was first conceived of in 1986, says Skyscraper Museum Director, Architectural historian Carol Willis. After that came three temporary spaces in Downtown New York and exhibits in other museums. After funding and space went forward, the building took only about a year and half to build and design.

"A permanent home in lower Manhattan was our dream from the start," says Willis. "These buildings are really about urban life and the urban condition. I hope we can allow people interpret their future from learning about their past."

Future exhibitions at the museum will include a dedication to the World Trade Center, including the original World Trade Center model, and later, a look at Frank Lloyd Wright's skyscraper projects and influences.

Sam Lubell

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/040402skyscraper.asp

[NYguy]

Newsday...

Tower power
The new downtown Skyscraper Museum celebrates Manhattan’s towering achievements, all on one floor.

Video
http://www.nynewsday.com/entertainment/nyc-justinsky,0,2340060.realvideo?coll=nyc-swapbox-homepage


BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON

Among the adaptive behaviors that Manhattanites acquire -- wading into rushing traffic to hail a cab, spending $9 on salad in a plastic box, scheduling children's play dates two weeks in advance -- is one crucial survival skill: the ability to make living space look bigger than it is.

The Skyscraper Museum has taken the art of illusory expansion to another level. The doughty little institution devoted to the tallest colossi, founded by architectural historian Carol Willis in 1996, had to camp out for years in borrowed spaces. It has just moved into its first permanent home: a tight, 5,800-square- foot, single-floor gallery in lower Manhattan that gives the impression of being lofty, luminous and vast.

Working with mirrors

To achieve this effect, architect Roger Duffy used the oldest trick in the interior designer's book: mirrors, which he deployed with boldness verging on flamboyance. If he had merely lined the ceilings with polished stainless-steel panels, he might have achieved a vulgar Las Vegas effect. Instead, he made ceilings and floors reflective, so a visitor feels suspended in an infinite vertical space, rather like being on a high floor of an all- glass skyscraper.

To reassure visitors that they are not stepping into empty space -- and to provide a modicum of traction -- he marked the floors with a pattern of rough-textured bars.

On the museum's opening day last Friday, Duffy, a design partner at the worldwide architecture firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill, proudly observed the first visitors' bewilderment at the way their reflections multiplied. "Come over to this corner," he said. "This is great." He pointed overhead to a pair of young women standing on an upper level -- except that the museum has no upper level. He gestured downward at the same women walking around a nonexistent floor below. "I brought in my 10-year-old son," Duffy said, "and he dropped to his knees and started crawling around because he felt like he was high up."

Museum like a skyscraper

The Skyscraper Museum's new home, on the ground floor of the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Battery Place, is more than a funhouse. It is a permanent shrine to the spectacle of New York's skyline. The shiny theatrics of the space are meant to evoke those of the city's architecture. "This idea of amplification is like seeing a skyscraper for the first time, the way it just opens up in front of you," Duffy said. "It creates an effect that's sympathetic with Carol's mission."

That mission is to describe why, when and how skyscrapers get built, and to point out that the quest for height rests on the bottom line. "My attachment to the skyscraper is a romantic notion, but my explanation for it is rational," said Willis, whose book on the topic is titled "Form Follows Finance."

"Skyscrapers are businesses in themselves. The first blueprint is always a balance sheet: If it's not going to make money, it's not going to get built." (The same can't be said for the museum, which exists because the location, the design and the services of Tishman Construction were all provided free.)

Because Willis focuses as much on the process of erecting towers as on the finished product, her proudest new acquisition is an archive of hundreds of photos taken by a construction engineer during the 11 months it took to build the Empire State Building in the early 1930s. The album spent 60 years moldering in an attic until the engineer's son turned it up and donated it to the museum, which had a conservator restore it.

Willis is excited that the museum finally gets to settle down. "It's wonderful not to have that 30-day cancellation clause hanging over us," she bubbled, as Duffy kept gazing around distractedly, eavesdropping on visitors' reactions. "I think this is going to be a popular place for fashion photo shoots," he interjected.

It may be popular for surreptitious photo shoots as well, given that the mirrored floors offer revealing vantages of anyone in a short skirt.

Two centuries of history

The inaugural exhibit, "Building a Collection," compresses the history of the skyscraper from the first iron-framed buildings in the 19th century -- which looked like behemoths at 10 or 12 stories -- to the Freedom Tower, New York's future bid for the title of world's tallest at 1,776 feet. Photos, architectural models, renderings and archival documents are arrayed along the walls and housed in miniature towers that can be rolled around the room on casters, so Willis can recompose her indoor metropolis at will.

(Future exhibits will range from nuts and bolts history to architectural fantasy, including a look in October at Frank Lloyd Wright's visionary and largely unrealized high-rise plans. The museum, the first downtown cultural facility to debut since Sept. 11, 2001, also plans to display the Minoru Yamasaki models of the World Trade Center towers.)

"We try to look well beyond the boundaries of design and architecture, to the construction, the business of skyscrapers and the interaction between building and cities," Willis said.

That's cities, plural: Skyscrapers are a global phenomenon. In the past 20 years, Asian cities have been building them at a tremendous clip, but as a treasury of towers, Manhattan remains unsurpassed, as Willis and Duffy rushed to point out almost in unison.

The historian stuck to fact: "Lower Manhattan contains a single square mile that represents the whole birth and development of the skyscraper, all within walking distance," Willis said.

The architect chimed in with a musical metaphor: "There's such a density of skyscrapers here in New York, such a crescendo, with some high notes above the others, but a whole ensemble that creates this orchestral power that you can't re-create anywhere else."

WHEN&WHERE

The Skyscraper Museum at 39 Battery Place is on the ground floor of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, at the tip of Battery Park City. Admission is $5, $2.50 students and seniors. The museum will be open Easter Sunday, noon-6. For additional hours and information on events, tours and lectures, call 212-968-1961. Its Web site, www.skyscraper.org, acts as a parallel institution and includes historical photos and an assortment of tools showing how New York developed.

[RandySavage]

I visited the Museum today for the first time. I paid the $2.50 student fee. The Museum is basically a single, medium-sized room. There are some nice models a couple of exhibits and sketches, but nothing is coordinated - so there is little to be learned.

This is my main grievance: When you visit the Museum of Natural History on 79th and you go to the Dinosaur and Ancient Mammals area (4th Floor), you begin by watching a video that explains how the exhibit is organized and what you will see as travel through it. When the video ends, you follow the path of evolution from early fishes to dinosaurs and finally to ancient mammals. The whole experience is coordinated, and if you pay attention and read the signage, it ends up being a terrific learning experience. This is what the Skyscraper Museum sorely lacks. It has no direction and very little audio/video. It feels like a few pictures and models tossed arbitrarily into a room. In all honesty, the LMDC Renewal exhibit in the Winter Garden is far more coordinated and impressive than the entire Skyscraper Musuem.

Like the nearby Native American Museum and the LMDC Renewal Exhibit, until this "museum" can offer something really special it should be completely free-of-charge....

[krulltime]

hmm....thanks for your opinion...I will take that under concideration when I go visit the museum. :wink:

[BigMac]

Downtown Express
April 30, 2004

Telling true tall tales at museum’s new home

By Deborah Lynn Blumberg

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_51/carol.jpg
Carol Willis, The Skyscraper Museum’s founder, director and curator.

Designers and builders from around the world know them as man’s version of an ant hill, a cultural icon, or the only way to rise up in a city to breathe fresh air. They are tall, they are soaring and they were born in New York—skyscrapers. For almost a decade, their story has shifted around New York City, from one temporary location to the next, but now, their rich history has finally found a home.

Last month, The Skyscraper Museum, an eight-year-old institution created by architectural and urban historian Carol Willis, opened the doors to its first permanent space at 39 Battery Place in Battery Park City. About 1,000 students, tourists, construction workers and Downtown residents visited the museum in the first five days, pouring over old photographs, postcards, books, drawings and displays on the history of skyscrapers in New York, the United States and abroad.

“We love [the space],” said Willis, the museum’s founder, director, and curator. “There are two aspects to love. The architecture — it’s a delight to see people come in and be awestruck by the dazzling and disorienting quality of height and depth of the space. And just having a permanent address is a really important step for us.”

Since 1999, Willis has planned the move from the museum’s last donated location on Maiden La. Millennium Partners donated the space, and architects and designers from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill provided their design services for free. The inaugural exhibition, “Building a Collection,” introduces visitors to the history of skyscrapers.

“The materials here are a reprise of things from the five exhibits we’ve had over our nomadic existence,” Willis said. “This show has some wonderful, unique items.” One such item is the Empire State Building photo album, a book that contains over 500 photographs the building’s construction. The museum recently acquired the album from a descendent of Paul Starrett, one of the two brothers of the firm Starrett Brothers and Eken, the building’s general contractor.

When visitors enter the museum, they are immediately surrounded by soaring buildings — from the exhibits’ pictures and postcards of New York’s greats, to the museum’s design. Architect Roger Duffy of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill used reflective steel to visually extend the museum’s display cases through the floor and ceiling into tall, skyscraper-like structures. “His concept was to turn the space into endlessly reflective vertical Versailles,” Willis said.

One exhibit, a blown up tenant list of the Woolworth Building in 1924, gives details on the businesses that filled the building’s 55 office floors. The Woolworth Company, visitors learn, occupied only two floors of the Downtown building, and smaller operations like the East European Trading Co., Dr. Reed Cushion Shoe Co., and the Transcontinental Freight Co., made up the remaining floors.

“I liked the list of all the tenants,” said Eliza Montgomery, 12, a seventh grade student from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, as she crouched in front of a display case last Sunday taking notes for a school project. “When I was six or seven, I visited the Empire State Building. I’m interested in it because it’s so tall.”

In a nearby display case, old postcards of New York skyscrapers form a colorful map of Lower Manhattan. In another case, visitors learn the story of Rockefeller Center and the building’s rooftop gardens, which when created were open to the public for a fee, but visible to all in the offices above. The museum also includes a wind tunnel model of the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, currently the tallest building in Asia, a case full of pictures and a job duty diary of the drillers, carpenters and bricklayers who helped to build the Empire State Building, and nine study models for the design of the World Trade Center Freedom Tower on loan from Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

Visitor William Allen, 16, said he enjoyed learning about the Freedom Tower, as he stood in front of a large black and white poster of Lower Manhattan and the Twin Towers. Allen found the museum on the Internet and traveled from Brooklyn to see the exhibits. “When I was in second grade, my mom brought home a pamphlet of the Empire State Building, and since then I’ve loved skyscrapers,” he said.

Museum exhibits deal with information on management, architecture, construction, and interesting facts for people who live and work in tall buildings. “The subject is very broadly interpreted,” Willis said. One of the museum’s main themes is to explore the meaning of skyscrapers, as noted in the exhibit’s introduction—“Skyscrapers are both symbols and facts. Emblems of identity or ego, they are also fundamentally economic equations.”

Pace University students Adnan Chaudhri, 23, and Alex Labidou, 21, who visited the museum for an art history course extra credit assignment, both said they enjoyed the museum, especially its design and the way exhibits offer a historical comparison of how buildings evolving over time.

“I’m pretty impressed,” Chaudhri said. “You want the structure of a museum to reflect what’s in it, and it does a great job. It gives a concise, yet detailed history of skyscrapers in New York City.”

The Skyscraper Museum is the only one of its kind in the world, Willis said. Several museums, such as Paris’ Center of Urbanism, focus on urban planning, but in the United States, no museum exists that focuses specifically on architecture.

“When I meet someone and I say what I do, people are surprised New York didn’t have one before. It seems obvious,” Willis said.

The museum’s permanent exhibit will not open until 2005, but Willis and her staff have planned several special exhibits for the coming months. In June, they will install a World Trade Center exhibition that will include Minoru Yamasaki’s original models of the World Trade Center towers, and on October 6, a special exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright.

On May 16, the museum will participate in Downtown Manhattan’s History and Heritage day, an event in the Winter Garden for all 14 Downtown museums. The museum’s booth will feature an iron worker talking about rivening and a film about construction of the Empire State Building, Willis said.

The museum also sponsors a free, monthly book series held at the Center for Architecture on LaGuardia Place. On May 25, James Traub, author of the Devil’s Playground will speak.

In the summer, Willis said she intends to hire an educator to begin group tours. To help cater to international visitors, she also hopes to soon add translations to a general gallery guide. The museum currently averages 100 visitors per day, a number that Willis hopes will increase in the summer months.

The Skyscraper Museum is located on the ground floor of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park City. Museum hours are noon-6 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday, and admission is $5, $2.50 students and seniors. 212-968-1961, www.skyscraper.org

Copyright 2004 Community Media LLC.

[MrShakespeare]

...New York as it was in 2000. (!)


May 14, 2004

Skyscrapers in Cyberspace: Maps and History Online

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2004/05/14/arts/14sky.l.jpg
The Web site of the Skyscraper Museum now features an interactive map connected to a virtual archive.

In the latest example of how museums are finding innovative ways to make their collections accessible on the Internet, the Skyscraper Museum has put online more than 2,000 documents about historic New York buildings by connecting the digitized images to an interactive map of Manhattan.

Starting today, visitors to the museum's Web site ( www.skyscraper.org ) can use the map to zoom into a neighborhood, select one of 120 big buildings and see its past depicted through postcards, construction photographs and other documents from the museum's archives. Each building is also shown as a three-dimensional drawing that can be viewed from four angles as a stand-alone structure or surrounded by its neighbors.

The interactive map is the centerpiece of the museum site's new Visual Index to the Virtual Archive, or VIVA. Clicking on Wall Street, for example, yields a nine-postcard sequence in which Trinity Church's spire is gradually overshadowed by a forest of financial towers. For the Empire State Building, curators have annotated two dozen postcards and 16 construction-era photographs.

Carol Willis, the museum's founding director, said the virtual archive would eventually provide online access to digital reproductions of the 5,000 artifacts in the museum's collection. Although one can also retrieve documents through a keyword search, Ms. Willis said using a map was a natural choice because the museum's subject is tied to geography. "A map is a way that people understand cities," she said.

As museums digitize their collections and cram their Web sites with images of artworks, archaeological artifacts and other cultural treasures, they also must decide how people can sort through the material. Most museum sites offer a search engine and a few chronologically organized virtual exhibitions. But museums, always cost-conscious and often conservative, are rarely inclined to experiment with how information is presented onscreen.

Judy Gradwohl, associate director for public programs at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, said the challenge for museums is to develop onscreen elements that help Web visitors make sense of what they see. "Well-designed collections interfaces offer more than a random walk through cool stuff," Ms. Gradwohl said. "They provide a thematic or narrative framework and a sense of the relationships between objects."

Maps are one approach. The Web site of the Theban Mapping Project (thebanmappingproject.com), based at American University in Cairo, lets visitors use an interactive map to explore the tombs of Thebes. Closer to home, the novelist Thomas Beller links essays and stories about New York to their settings on a satellite map of Manhattan (mrbellersneighborhood.com).

As computers get better at rendering three-dimensional images, cultural-heritage organizations are using architectural-modeling software to reconstruct historic places. The St. Louis Virtual City Project (umsl.edu/~virtualstl), which is being developed by the University of St. Louis at Missouri, offers a virtual exploration of that city's streets in the mid-1800's along with readings about Dred Scott's trials leading to the Supreme Court case that made slavery legal in all the territories.

The Skyscraper Museum's map is itself a historic artifact because it captures New York as it was in 2000. "We were interested in defining things at the millennium," Ms. Willis said. The map displays Manhattan's lower half, which contains most of the city's large buildings. Another feature of the visual archive is a series of skyline silhouettes, which can be compared with old postcard views.

In April the museum relocated to Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan after seven years on the move. During its nomadic existence, Ms. Willis said, the museum became committed to the Internet as a place to record its activities. "We decided that the Web site would be the museum until we had the permanent home," she said.

Creating the online archive cost more than $200,000. A grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services helped pay for digitizing the collection. Meanwhile, the museum's "Big Buildings" exhibition in 1999 had used a map from Earth Data Solutions, an information-technology company in New York. The company donated a copy of the map.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Archit_K]

Nice

[BigMac]

New York Post
July 5, 2004

Towering Spirit At Museum

By MATTHEW SWEENEY

As the city marked Independence Day with the groundbreaking of the new Freedom Tower, the Skyscraper Museum opened its exhibit on the buildings it will replace — the Twin Towers.

"The World Trade Center really culminates the evolution of the skyscraper in the 20th century," said Carol Willis, director of the museum, located in Battery Park City.

The exhibition's centerpiece is the original 7-foot-tall model of architect Minoru Yamasaki's design.

Architect Daniel Libeskind's Freedom Tower model is on display nearby.

Much like its planned replacement is today, the World Trade Center was a lightning rod for controversy. It was a source of headaches for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and the Port Authority before construction even started in 1966.

"Skyscrapers don't usually see a lot of public-policy intrusions," Willis said. "But the World Trade Center did, and the Freedom Tower comes with a lot of contestation."

As revolutionary as they were at the time, buildings as tall as the trade center or Sears Tower in Chicago now belong to a past generation, Willis said.

"We're not going to build at that scale again," she said.

She hopes the Freedom Tower brings a different kind of revolution to New York.

"What's interesting now, especially with the Freedom Tower, is that it may be a harbinger of green architecture in New York," Willis said, referring to the plan to build wind turbines and other energy-creating innovations into the structure.

A number of people have said they want to rebuild the Twin Towers as they were. When asked which she prefers, the Twin Towers or the Freedom Tower, Willis deftly sidestepped.

"The Empire State Building is my favorite skyscraper in the world."

Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Mine too!

[BigMac]

savethewtc from SkyscraperCity posted this picture of the model that is on display (Yamasaki is on the far right sitting down):

http://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/WTC_MONUMENT/CONTENT/html/Pics/wtcyamasaki.jpg

[Archit_K]

:shock: I got to see this!

[Kris]

http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/interiors/archives/0409skyscraper-1.asp

[simmonmt]

As revolutionary as they were at the time, buildings as tall as the trade center or Sears Tower in Chicago now belong to a past generation, Willis said.

"We're not going to build at that scale again," she said.


For heaven's sake, why not? The rest of the world doesn't seem to have any problems with building that tall.

[Bob]

This alone is worth a visit to the Skyscraper Museum. Both the model and the museum are terrific!

[asdf]

As of August 9, $1.00 discount coupons to the Skyscraper Museum are available in the Museum of Modern Art, Queens.

[MrShakespeare]

NYC from another perspective. Has some good tips. :)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/21/TRGFE9TBHT1.DTL&type=printable


SKY HIGH
Interest in design
Skyscraper Museum, stylish buildings reflect new attitude
- John King, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 21, 2004


New York -- New York's attitude toward its abundance of great architecture has tended to be pretty much the same as its attitude toward most everything else: brusque nonchalance.

Sure, such crowns on the skyline as the Chrysler Building merit attention. The Guggenheim Museum's swirls are worth a pause. But the New York state of mind has tended to treat these treasures as givens; if you want to act like a rube and gawk at buildings, pal, catch the next flight to Chicago.
Now all that's starting to change, and at times it seems as though architecture is receiving the sort of focused attention usually reserved for masthead changes at the New York Times. Two cultural facilities devoted to the discipline have opened this year, the most accessible galleries yet in terms of making the design of buildings part of the city's public discourse. And they arrive at a time when buildings both small and large already are stirring debate about their aesthetics, not just their size.

"An interest and appetite has developed. People are tuned into new ideas, and there's a cachet to design issues," says Carol Willis, founder of the Skyscraper Museum. "Even five years ago, you didn't see this here."
Part of the new debate, sadly, is rooted in tragedy: the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists was a too-searing reminder that New York's architectural icons cast shadows around the world. The debate over the site's future put the topic of how buildings should look -- and the cultural role they can play -- front and center on the civic stage.

But the architectural equivalent of water-cooler talks have also been sparked by the evidence at hand: new buildings that have a jolting flamboyance, and revived landmarks that confront people with the sensuous joy that a great building can impart.

There's no easy walking tour of the highlights (and lowlights) of the new burst of energy, because the changes are spread across Manhattan and buried in its dense steep grid. Nor is there a major showcase devoted to the city's built terrain. But one distinct perspective is located at the island's southern tip, and in a most unlikely venue: a storefront-like space on the back side of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

That's the home of the Skyscraper Museum, which opened in April. The museum was founded in 1996 by Willis, an urban studies professor at Columbia University, but it had no permanent base until Willis wangled a commitment from the Ritz-Carlton developers to include the space in their tower as a public benefit because "it just seemed so obvious to me -- New York is a skyscraper city."

The space itself is as startling as any on Manhattan: to overcome the limitation of the tight space, the museum is designed with highly reflective floors and ceilings that expand the space in all directions, like funhouse mirrors. Enter the gallery and it seems as though you're standing on a scaffold -- but those people on some third-floor balcony or in a basement alcove are in fact your reflection.

The main exhibit right now is on Frank Lloyd Wright's various tower proposals, only one of which was ever built (it's now a boutique hotel near Tulsa, Okla.). But there's also a strong New York emphasis with displays that include a construction diary from the Empire State Building and the original seven-foot-high models of the World Trade Center.

Another new institution offers less of a sensory overload, but more of a tie to the architectural now.

The Center for Architecture is located in Greenwich Village, just two blocks south of Washington Square, and it opened last October as the new home for the city's chapter of the American Institute of Architects. But there is also a strong public component: exhibit space that includes a glassed-in display are along the sidewalk where models already have been exhibited of the Freedom Tower rising at the World Trade Center site, as well as a slender 835- foot condominium tower designed by Spanish engineer Santiago Calatrava and a proposed New York Jets stadium.

"We don't want this to be a clubhouse for architects -- it's a gathering place where people come to learn about what's going on in the city," says Frederic Bell, executive director of the chapter. The building also hosted 1,200 events in its first year, from book-signings to presentations by such newsworthy architects as Zaha Hadid and Richard Meier. For the main current exhibit, on federal design of the past 15 years, there was even a panel discussion on a Boston courthouse where one of the speakers was Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who oversaw the early-'90s project.

"It was pretty cool to host a Supreme Court justice talking about design, " Bell says.

As welcome as the center and museum are, they're secondary to the main event: plunging into a city that demands to be explored. But amid the drama and obvious attractions -- Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building -- it's worth searching out a few examples of fresh changes to the familiar show.

Grand Central Station, for example: It's been around since 1913, but a late '90s restoration brought it to a state of splendor that feels too good to be true. Enter off 42nd Street, walk a few yards and you're confronted with one of the most uplifting interior spaces in America - a vast stone-clad room with currents of commuters streaming through in all directions under a vaulted ceiling painted to look like a starry sky.

A landmark of a much different sort has also been restored nine blocks north on Park Avenue. That's Lever House, one of New York's first and best modern office towers. The 24-story structure from 1952 is downright modest by later standards, and austere by any measurement, but two things have always made it stand out: the clean elegance of the green-tinted glass curtain wall and the generous public space folded through the beneath the building at ground level. A 2002 face-lift replaced the original glass and finally redid the public areas along the lines envisioned by artist Isamu Noguchi, with marble seating and Noguchi sculptures.

Much newer, but also glassy and distinctive, is the LVMH tower on 57th Street. Architect Christian de Portzamparc took the narrow mid-block site and filled it with what looks not like a building as much as folds of translucent and tinted glass cloaking a willowy 24-story frame.

If the LVMH Tower is a chimera, lighter than air, then the American Folk Art Museum is all solid mass. The small structure that opened in 2002 on 53rd Street next to the New York Museum of Modern Art (itself in a palatial yet restrained new home that opens this month) is designed by architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams of New York, and feels like an intricate mosaic of layer upon layer of gallery space tucked behind thick walls of dark metal. There's a rough-hewn and earthbound air that would be at home in the southwest, but in Midtown Manhattan feels impossibly exotic - and is not to be missed.

Not all new buildings are triumphs, of course, but even the oddballs spark conversation.

A perfect example is the Westin New York at Times Square designed by the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica. It is 45 stories, with a glass wall accented by multi-colored stripes in no obvious pattern and split in two vertically by a lit curve as though a meteor had sliced down from the heavens.

The building's split is nothing compared to the gulf among architectural critics back when the Westin opened in 2002. The New York Times' architecture critic at the time, Herbert Muschamp, rhapsodized around the arrival of "post- modernized Mondrian: Broadway Samba." By contrast, the New Yorker's Paul Goldberger recoiled at a tower "shrill and banal, less a piece of architecture than a developer's box in drag."

I side with Goldberger, but you be the judge.

And there is -- strange and slightly creepy but true -- New York's new twin towers, the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. Two glass shafts linked at the base by shops and expensive restaurants rise 750 feet at the southwest corner of Central Park -- dramatic accents on the skyline to some, overbearing blights to other.

To Bay Area eyes, though, what's striking is something that's mostly been ignored: the utter disregard for the street life in this intensely urban setting. For instance, the office and residential lobby entrances on 59th Street are so grimly bleak that as I approached the site walking up Broadway I mistook them for loading docks.

The real sign of New York's new creativity, though, is found outside the obvious neighborhoods.

To see a truly exhilarating example, stand at the Ninth Avenue entrance to Chelsea Market, a transformed cookie factory on 15th Street that comes off as our Ferry Building's punk cousin. Look across the street at a brick warehouse from 1905 has been re-imagined by the rising New York avant-garde architecture firm SHoP. No mere restoration with an addition tucked demurely in back, the building has been nearly doubled in size with a four-story addition clad in zinc that has slit-like windows and cantilevers over the roof of an adjacent building.

It's hard to imagine this kind of casual architectural provocation in any American local but New York. And that's what makes it so stimulating -- just like the city itself.

If you go

All locations are in Manhattan.

Skyscraper Museum, inside Battery Park City (home of Ritz-Carlton), 39 Battery Place. (212) 968-1961; www.skyscraper.org. Noon-6 p.m. Wednesday- Sunday. $5 adults, $2.50 students and seniors.

Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place (Greenwich Village). (212) 683-0023; www.aiany.org. Gallery open 9 a.m. -8 p.m. weekdays,11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday.

Grand Central Station, 42nd Street and Park Avenue. For information on tours and special events, visit www.grandcentralterminal.com.

Lever House, Park Avenue and 53rd Street. The Lever House Restaurant (390 Park Ave., but enter on 53rd; 212-888-2700, www.leverhouse.com) serves lunch weekdays and dinner nightly. Dinner entrees $29-$76 (average $30-$45).

LVMH tower, 21 E. 57th St. (between Madison and Fifth avenues). Home of the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy headquarters.

American Folk Art Museum, 45 W. 53rd St., New York. (212) 265-1040, www.folkartmuseum.org. 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday (till 7:30 Friday); closed Monday. $9 adults, $7 students and seniors, free for children under 12.

Where to stay

The Maritime Hotel, 363 W. 16th St. (212) 242-4300, www.themaritimehotel.com. The coolest address in the red-hot Meatpacking district was built in 1966 as the headquarters of the Maritime Union; it's clad in white ceramic tiles with porthole windows; rooms have a kitschy mock-nautical decor. Doubles from $235.

70 Park Avenue Hotel, (212) 973-2400, www.70parkavenuehotel.com. San Francisco's Kimpton chain has opened its first New York property on a quiet stretch of the storied avenue. Demure rooms and a stylish restaurant, the Silverleaf Tavern. Doubles from $275.

The Cosmopolitan Hotel, 95 W. Broadway. (888) 895-9400, www.cosmohotel.com. Stylish it isn't, but for cleanliness and location, this small inn can't be beat. A subway stop is outside the front door; Tribeca is on the north, and the former World Trade Center is to the south. Doubles from $129.

For more information

Municipal Art Society, (212) 935-3960, www.mas.org. A 111-year-old civic organization in the historic Villard Houses at 457 Madison Ave. Besides exhibit space, it has the excellent Urban Center Books (www.urbancenterbooks.com), a store jammed with everything from thin guidebooks to fat academic treatises.

[Hof]

Who has information on the tube of white bricks,located on the hotel plaza just south of the Museum's entry?
The piece is so unique I had to walk up to it and examine it's texture.It's a very well done piece of "street"art.
I took a photo one day when I passed,blew it up and framed it,and everyone who sees it wants to know more about it.
I vowed to find out whose work it is,but I procrastinate a lot so I never did.
Anyone know who designed it or what it is named?
Or why it is there?

[BigMac]

LowerManhattan.info
February 2, 2006

Skyscraper Museum Exhibit Showcases Green Towers

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/images/news/175r_ttd_skyscraper_lg.jpg
New exhibit at Skyscraper Museum features designs of sustainable buildings in Lower Manhattan

Through its current display, the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park seeks to educate visitors on the principles and technologies of green design through the display of models, computer simulations, material samples, and more.

The exhibit, which opened January 24, is entitled "Green Towers for New York: From Visionary to Vernacular." It focuses on 14 sustainable high-rise buildings already completed or in progress in the city. These projects range from corporate headquarters, such as the New York Times, Hearst, and Bank of America towers, to new office buildings like 7 World Trade Center to residential projects in Battery Park City. "Green Towers" will also compare the technologies of older construction, including plumbing, heating, and cooling systems, with the newest developments in these fields.

A green or sustainable building is one that conserves energy and resources, reduces emission of hazardous substances, and improves the quality of life for inhabitants. The exhibition will also spotlight the Solaire (http://www.thesolaire.com/), the nation's first environmentally responsible high-rise residential building, located in Battery Park City. Engineered to be earth-friendly, the Solaire, which was completed in 2003, consumes 35 percent less energy and conserves 50 percent more water than traditional residential buildings. It also provides high indoor air quality and an abundance of natural light.

"Advocates for sustainable design have been gaining momentum since the late 1990s, when showcase structures such as 4 Times Square (the Condé Nast Building) demonstrated how high-performance buildings could save energy and water and offer healthier interior environments for employees and boost their productivity," says Carol Willis, the museum's founder, director, and curator. "All of this is good economics, for the building owner and for the business client, as well as for cleaner air in the urban environment. So, one important message of "Green Towers" is that everybody wins with sustainable building design."

In addition to showing the benefits of green design, the exhibition also helps showcase how energy efficient New York City is, with its high density, high-rise developments and reliance on mass transit.

"New York City can be called the greenest place in America when measured by energy use per inhabitant. If the city were the fifty-first state, it would rank twelfth in population and last in energy consumption," Willis says. "The transit strike vividly illustrated one of the reasons why; New Yorkers use mass transit, which cuts down enormously our use of energy."

The Skyscraper Museum offers eight lectures in conjunction with its 2006 exhibition "Green Towers for New York: From Visionary to Vernacular." "Green Teams" highlights the creative collaboration among clients, developers, architects, engineers, builders, material manufacturers, and building-systems designers who have developed the new generation of New York's sustainable skyscrapers. The series also explores the current dynamic of design and dissemination of green building strategies. For more information on the lecture series, click here (http://www.skyscraper.org/WHAT'S_UP/CURRENT/programs.htm) or call the museum at (212) 968-1961.

©2005 Company 39, Inc.

[Kris]

February 2, 2006

High-Rises That Have Low Impact on Nature

By ROBIN POGREBIN

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/02/02/arts/hearst.184.jpg
The Hearst Tower recycles rainwater and automatically turns off lights.

With its curtain wall and faceted crystal design, the Bank of America building rising at 1 Bryant Park in Manhattan probably seems unremarkable to New Yorkers accustomed to looming glass skyscrapers. But it's not architecture with a capital A that makes the tower unusual.

It is the double-wall technology that dissipates the sun's heat; ventilation that runs under the floor rather than through overhead ducts; carbon-dioxide monitors that assure adequate fresh air; and a system that collects and reuses rainwater and wastewater, saving 10.3 million gallons of water each year.

Planners expect the $1 billion building, designed by Cook + Fox Architects with the Durst Organization as developer, to be the first skyscraper to earn a top environmental rating from a coalition of building industry leaders when it opens in 2008.

The tower is among 15 projects highlighted in an exhibition on environmentally sensitive, or green, architecture that opened recently at the Skyscraper Museum. Titled "Green Towers for New York: From Visionary to Vernacular," it includes buildings under construction or under contract, including Lord Norman Foster's Hearst Tower, David Childs's Freedom Tower at ground zero, the Helena and Mosaic apartment buildings on the West Side of Manhattan and towers in Battery Park City.

The projects are emblematic of a new consciousness among architects, developers and construction companies that most big urban buildings consume and pollute natural resources and fail to harvest energy that is naturally available.

Investing in sustainable structures will yield long-term benefits in efficiency and productivity, the thinking now goes, and will prove a boon in marketing terms as people become educated about such buildings.

"We really have reached a point of critical mass in these big high-rise green projects," said Carol Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, adding, "From developers to construction managers to vendors, all the components of green building are in place, poised to be adopted in a broad market."

Not so long ago, green construction was largely dismissed as prohibitively expensive and as just so much political correctness. But the arrival of the Condé Nast tower in Times Square in 1999, designed by Fox & Fowle and billed as the first green skyscraper in New York, sent the message that corporate America saw something to gain from the green model.

"What we did was take it from a Birkenstock cultural environment into a pinstripe environment," said Bruce Fowle, of what is now FXFowle. "It was really seat-of-the-pants. We didn't even know if we should call it green."

The Condé Nast building is difficult to classify because it predated the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system, established in 2000 by the U.S. Green Building Council, a coalition of construction-industry leaders with environmental concerns. Its scoring system rates buildings on their environmental performance — energy and water consumption, indoor air quality, use of renewable materials and durability, for example.

The ratings, assigned only after the completion of a building, range from certified (26 points) to platinum (52 points). The paperwork is cumbersome and the process can be costly — total certification fees run from $1,250 for official LEED members with small projects to $15,000 for nonmembers with large projects. But the ratings have become a much-coveted badge of approval. About 3,400 projects nationwide have registered their intention to seek LEED certification since 2000, and 400 have been certified.

"Most people I'm building for are setting silver as the goal," said Daniel R. Tishman, chairman and chief executive of the Tishman Construction Corporation, whose projects include 7 World Trade Center, part of the exhibition. "A lot of the technologies LEED is trying to achieve are now accepted as part of New York City building code."

In New York State, 10 projects have been certified and 191 projects in progress have applied for LEED certification, 98 of which are in the New York metropolitan area.

The Skyscraper Museum show includes architectural models, drawings, computer renderings and samples of building materials. Among the projects featured are Goldman Sachs's headquarters in Battery Park City, which has a green roof, low-flow plumbing fixtures and carpeting with reduced chemical levels; a research laboratory for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on East 68th Street in Manhattan, which uses fritted glass and materials without ozone-depleting components; and a new Midtown headquarters for The New York Times Company on Eighth Avenue at 40th Street in Manhattan, which features an interior garden open to the sky and ceramic tubes that calibrate sunlight entering the building.

Some of the projects in progress are going for the gold. The Hearst Tower's "diagrid" frame incorporates about 20 percent less steel than the average structure — saving about 2,000 tons of steel. The building's glass has a special coating that lets in natural light while keeping out the solar radiation that causes heat. Interior walls will be coated with low-vapor paints, and office furniture will be formaldehyde-free.

Motion sensors will allow for lights and computers to be turned off when a room is empty, and the roof will collect rainwater, thus reducing runoff by 25 percent. Collected in two 14,000-gallon reclamation tanks in the basement, the rainwater will replace water lost to evaporation in the building's air-conditioning system and will irrigate plantings and trees inside and outside the building.

The rainwater will also become décor — the raw material for "Ice Falls," a three-story water sculpture in the grand atrium that also humidifies and cools the lobby.

The Hearst is vying with 7 World Trade Center for the distinction of becoming the first LEED-rated office tower to open in the city. The only New York building to be certified so far is the Solaire in Battery Park City, which received a gold rating; 10 others in the state have been certified.

Chris Garvin, co-chairman of the environment committee of the American Institute of Architects' New York chapter, said that while several cities worldwide were ahead of New York in commissioning sustainable architecture, among them London and Portland, Ore., "I think we're making strides."

New York City's awareness about building green has developed slowly. In 1997 the city established an office of sustainable design. Two years later, the city set a range of "best practices"' for energy-efficient buildings.

In 2000 state legislators approved a state tax credit for new or rehabilitated buildings that meet green standards. But for the city, the watershed moment came in October, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed into law the Green City Buildings Act, which required that nonresidential projects costing $2 million or more meet LEED standards. The legislation also applied to private projects that receive $10 million or more in public financing or are at least half financed by public money. The bill takes effect next January and is estimated to affect $12 billion in new construction.

Architects were perhaps the first to embrace environmental design, people in the industry say, and green building principles are now standard at most architecture firms and architecture schools. "Any architecture firm of any size has seen this as a necessary knowledge — a necessary skill to compete for getting good work," said Rafael Pelli of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects.

Some developers have been slow to come around. "This is very young in New York City, and we're at the beginning of it," Mr. Pelli said. "To some extent, it's the education of an industry."

A crucial component of that education is clarifying costs. Building green used to add as much as 20 percent to a project's cost, by some estimates. That figure has recently declined to between 2 and 5 percent, largely because of the availability of new technologies and building materials.

There is a strong economic argument for building green, experts say. Sustainable structures limit operation and maintenance costs and increase productivity.

Because people want to live and work in buildings that are good for their health, there are marketing benefits, too. Green office buildings also command rents as much as 10 percent above the norm, said Douglas Durst, president of the Durst Organization. "You don't fall asleep at 3 in the afternoon, even if you had a big lunch," he added.

For David J. Burney, the commissioner of New York City's design and construction department, green principles are not so much idealistic as a simple matter of common sense.

"It's almost become as American as apple pie now," he said.

"Green Towers for New York" runs through May at the Skyscraper Museum, 39 Battery Place, Battery Park City, (212) 968-1961.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Merry]

Skyscraper Museum Gives Nod to New York's Industrial Past

Part of the exhibit takes a look at what New York used to look like when much of it was industrial.

By Della Hasselle

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DOWNTOWN — A new exhibit at the downtown Skyscraper Musuem takes a look at an older time in New York, when now-posh areas like SoHo and TriBeCa were homes to sprawling factories.

The Vertical Urban Factory exhibit (http://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/VERTICAL_URBAN_FACTORY/vuf.htm), which opened Wednesday, features factories of all materials, designs and time periods, such as the monumental Starrett-Lehigh building, designed in Chelsea in 1931 that used to have railroad tracks running through its bottom floor, to the present New York Times Building near Times Square.

The New York section of the exhibit highlights the time in the 1920s when New York was considered to be America's greatest manufacturing city.

"The idea, one of the points, was to show that New York really was a very diverse and complex industrial city," the museum's guest curator and architecture professor Nina Rappaport said before the exhibits opening Tuesday.

"It shows how factories were everywhere, not in just one isolated area."

From masonry workshops to concrete warehouses, cast-iron loft buildings to steel-framed skyscrapers, the New York section of the exhibit shows how high-rises developed as manufacturing sites everywhere from the Bronx to the Garment District, leading the way to both the ritzy lofts and run-down warehouses one might see today around the city.

The exhibit also delves into the construction of the Garment District, which was once the home to the world's highest concentration of clothing manufactoring, and the factors that led up to the famous zoning laws of the 1920's that sought to regulate industrial land use in the country.

In addition to photographs, the exhibit features maps, infographs and miniature history lessons for each building.

The entire exhibit surveys more than 30 projects, organized into modern factories, contemporary factories, New York factories and future factories.

In the future factories section, Rappaport takes a moment to contemplate the lessons factory owners have learned in the past, and how to integrate manufacturing into non-industrial areas of big cities like New York in the future.

In particular, the section focuses on design and energy-saving modules.

"What if there was manufacturing everywhere again because it was greener, cleaner, local and small?" Rappaport asked while perusing the future section.

"The industry has changed, and now there's new potential. So...why not?"

The exhibit will run through June 2011.

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