Ten & Taller: 1874-1900
Sunday, Sep 25, 201612 PM — Sunday, Apr 30, 20176 PMEDT
| The Skyscraper Museum
New York, NY, USRelated
TEN & TALLER was first conceived as a web project that capitalized on a goldmine of research on the structural systems employed in the city’s earliest tall buildings collected by engineer and historian Donald Freidman. His comprehensive survey of every building of ten or more stories erected in Manhattan through 1900 became the basis of our effort to document and visualize the full group. To do so, we created three complementary ways to view all buildings, in effect, simultaneously: as a GRID of historic images, organized by year; as a MAP, marked with the footprints of each building, color-coded by use; and as a TIMELINE that graphs both the height and the use of each building.
The TEN & TALLER interfaces and exhibition offer a new way of seeing the historical development of the skyscraper typology and of its commercial and urban growth. By documenting ALL the city’s tall buildings – rather than focusing on just the TALL-est – and by emphasizing their diverse uses and spatial geography, the three interfaces contradict several popular narratives: for example, a technologically-driven evolution of buildings from smaller to taller; or a steady march of development northward up the island. However, one truism is clear: by the turn of the 20th century, New York’s high-rise real estate was defining the city’s modern identity as both the “capital of capitalism” and as the world’s premier skyscraper metropolis.
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