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Tower power
The new downtown Skyscraper Museum celebrates Manhattan’s towering achievements, all on one floor.
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.
the Skyscraper Museum
Started by
NYguy
, Apr 08 2004 01:00 PM
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