The Skyscraper Museum, as it is officially called, opened its doors in April 2004 and is the first of its kind devoted to high-rise architecture. Its initial exhibit, ‘Building a Collection’, was an eclectic selection of photographs, models and blueprints of skyscrapers from all over the world.

The museum celebrates New York City’s rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. Through exhibitions, programmes and publications, it explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence.

Carol Willis, the founder and director of the museum, says its mission is to interpret the evolving history of the skyscraper. “It looks back to the beginnings of skyscrapers, but looks at more than architecture and engineering or technology. It also looks at development, financing, construction management, the way that spaces are occupied as places of work and residence.”

Though small in size, the Skyscraper Museum’s striking design, which features a polished, stainless steel floor and a high, reflective glass ceiling, creates an illusion of space.

Tishman Construction Corporation, which donated its services to construct the Skyscraper Museum, is the same company that built the original World Trade Centre in New York (whose twin towers were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks), and is under contract to build the new Freedom Tower at the site.

As a tribute to the fallen World Trade Centre towers, the Skyscraper Museum mounted a special exhibit, starting in June 2004 and continuing until July 2006. The museum added to its regular gallery the original model of the Trade Centre created for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey by the architect Minoru Yamasaki.

Another exhibition, ‘Giants: The Twin Towers and the Twentieth Century’, held more recently at the museum (September 2006 to April 2007), also commemorated the original World Trade Centre, viewing its creation in the context of the technological ambitions of the 1960s’ and the hundred-year evolution of New York’s skyline. The latest exhibition to be organised at the Skyscraper Museum - October 24, 2007 to March 2008,  is titled ‘Future City: 20/21’. The first in a cycle of three related exhibitions, spanning a year, is called ‘New York Modern’, and looks back at prophecies of the skyscraper city in the early 20th century, when the first dreams of a vertical metropolis took shape. From the invention of the tall office buildings and high-rise hotels in the late 19th century, New York began to expand upward. ‘New York Modern’ explores the idea of the skyscraper city of the future in the context of phenomenal urban expansion, pressing problems of congestion and over-building, and new tools for planning and control. It also looks closely at Rockefeller Centre, the three-block complex of harmonised buildings, roof gardens and pedestrian zones.