Architecture and the City

Skyscraper Museum and Shanghai/Manhattan Exhibition

Look at the shiny floors and those sleek walls and glass

It was my first time at the Skyscraper Museum and what a space it was! Tiny but nice! Located in Lower Manhattan by Battery Park City, The Skyscraper Museum celebrates the City’s rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. There is something wonderful and almost playful about a museum dedicated to skyscrapers – that innate and deep fascination and awe that comes with the experience of a tall building. Skyscrapers are looked at as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence and a study in how awesome the vertical is and how that is intrinsic and characteristic of a unique type of metropolis.

Current Exhibition | China Prophecy: Shanghai

The exhibition takes a close look at Shanghai as a model for 21st century urbanism and what a model it is!

Shanghai today is a vast metropolis, physically transformed by the twin emblems of the modern city, high-rises and highways. In the historic core, Puxi, skyscrapers of 30 to 60+ stories have replaced traditional lane housing and low-rise neighborhoods. In the new district of Pudong, on the east side of the Huangpu River, a master plan dictates taller towers rising from open green space. The climax of the Pudong skyline is a trio of iconic supertalls: Jin Mao, Shanghai World Financial Center, and Shanghai Tower (2014), expected to reach 632 meters to become the tallest building in China and second tallest in the world.

What I found intriguing was that the scale and speed of Shanghai’s rise reproduces and even surpasses Manhattan’s historic ascent in the early twentieth century. As the world’s largest city in 1930, New York boasted a population of nearly 7 million and some 200 skyscrapers –more than all other cities combined at that time. Today, as high-rises proliferate everywhere, Hong Kong holds the title with 7,200. Shanghai with its continual development and ascending status and cultural force may be a potent symbol of China and for us in general as an urban blueprint for development.

These towers are amazing. So pretty!

Skyscrapers!!!!

Oh Shanghai. What a funky, wonderful metropolitan place. I want to be there and go walk. and hide and be alive.