CAROL WILLIS
FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR
THE SKYSCRAPER MUSEUM
NEW YORK CITY
In Partnership with the DMA and its exhibition
Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art
25 September 2018
Tuesday, 7:00 pm
Horchow Auditorium, DMA
Forum Reception and check-in 6:15 pm
Carol Willis is the Founder, Director, and Curator of The Skyscraper Museum in New York City. An architectural and urban historian, she has researched, taught, and written about the history of American city building. She is the author of Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton Architectural Press), which received an AIA book award and was named “Best Book on North American Urbanism, 1995” by the Urban History Association. Critic Herbert Muschamp has praised Willis in The New York Times as “the brilliant and energetic woman who created the Skyscraper Museum in 1996 from nothing but her imagination, her passion for New York architecture, and her belief in the importance of history and the value of the public realm.”
Willis is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University where since 1989 she has taught in the program The Shape of Two Cities: New York and Paris in The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has taught courses on the history of architecture at Parsons School of Design in New York and for eleven summers conducted walking tours on the history of French architecture for Parsons in Paris.
Before establishing The Skyscraper Museum, Willis was guest curator for exhibits on the architects Raymond Hood and Hugh Ferriss. In conjunction with the exhibit Hugh Ferriss: Metropolis, she oversaw the facsimile reprint of the delineator’s 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow, contributing a historical essay on Ferriss and appendices (published by Princeton Architectural Press). In addition to articles in books and scholarly journals, Willis is the editor for Building the Empire State, a book on the construction of New York’s signature skyscraper, published by W.W. Norton. She has written introductions to numerous monographs and collections, including Skyscraper Rivals, New York Architecture, Manhattan Skyscrapers, and New York Deco, and has appeared in numerous national and international television documentaries and radio broadcasts, including programs for The History Channel, PBS, A & E, BBC Television, NPR, and BBC World Service Radio.
Willis majored in Art History at Boston University, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She did her graduate work in architectural history at Columbia University in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, receiving both an M.A. and M.Phil. She has also been the recipient of numerous grants and awards.
About the Skyscraper Museum:
Located in New York City, the world’s first and foremost vertical metropolis, The Skyscraper Museum celebrates the City’s rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. Through exhibitions, programs and publications, 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. For a description of the gallery and for photos of the space, see the Photo Slideshows page. Contemporary in design, the museum features polished stainless steel floors and ceilings, along with display cases that soar from floor to ceiling.
The Skyscraper Museum, now located in a permanent gallery in Lower Manhattan, inhabited four temporary spaces from 1997 to 2003. The gallery was closed after September 11th, 2001, when the space was used as an emergency information center to assist downtown businesses. In March 2004, The Skyscraper Museum opened its permanent home in a building at the southern tip of Battery Park City. The facility occupies ground-floor space in a mixed-use project that includes the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and a 38-story condominium tower. The Museum owns its space, which has been generously donated by Millennium Partners, the building’s developers.
The facility contains two main galleries: one for the core exhibit Skyscraper/City on the evolution of New York’s commercial skyline, and another for changing shows. With a permanent home, the Museum also began the process of collecting and preserving important artifacts of high-rise history, of organizing an active education program, and of celebrating New York’s rich architectural heritage.
With the skyline of Lower Manhattan as its immediate backdrop and the panorama of New York harbor at its front door, the Museum enjoys a site of breathtaking beauty and an unmatched location for cultural tourism and serves as a vital element in the changed landscape of downtown. A short walk from the historic skyscrapers and canyons of lower Broadway and Wall Street, and minutes from the embarkation point of boats to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the Museum stands at a nexus of past and present that attracts over 10 million tourists annually.