“This is one of my favorite objects,” announces architectural historian Carol Willis as she strides into the living room of her Manhattan apartment. “It’s a good example of the kind of artifact that was a breath away from the garbage can.”
Squatting on the floor, Willis unrolls an old floor plan from the Woolworth Building. Bits of colored paper cover the outlines of the various offices. Each faded slip–affixed in 1920–is inscribed with a tenant’s name, from E.F. Hutton to Western Union. “The Woolworth Building was occupied on only two floors by Woolworth itself,” she notes. “The other 53 floors were occupied by over 1,000 tenants.”
That’s been the case with most high rise office buildings. Erected not solely as corporate headquarters, but as rent producers, they were speculative properties. And not unlike them, Willis is pursing a risky business of her own. Working virtually alone with few financial resources, she has set about establishing The Skyscraper Museum, dedicated to examining “the past, present and future of the skyscraper as an urban building type.”
And, so far, she has succeeded.
Her fledgling institution opened in May in a 1926 tower at 44 Wall Street. But with neither a permanent collection nor a place of its own (its debut digs are on loan from the building’s owner, New York Life), The Skyscraper Museum is barely off the drawing board.
Willis’ dream sprang, in part, from “Light, Height and Site: The Skyscraper in Chicago,” a catalog essay she wrote for the Art Institute’s 1993 exhibition, “1923-1993: Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis.” She went on to expand her thoughts in “Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago,” (Princeton Architectural Press). “It was through that essay that I got interested in the idea of how the land platting of the city and municipal regulations, along with market considerations and economic determinant, produced very different formal types.
“I realized that from the 1890s through the 1940s, the office is exactly the same in both cities, but the skyscrapers are completely different. Chicago was more conservative in restricting height. Plus, it had these great big blocks. When the blocks are big and you’re dependent on daylight for illumination, you can only make offices 25 to 28 feet deep from the exterior window. That’s not the case in New York, which had smaller sites and no limit on height. So the New York type is the tower and the Chicago type is a square building with an interior courtyard, like the Rookery. Oddly enough, no other architectural historian had ever sat down and compared the two cities and why the buildings looked so different across a span of time.”
Keen on this kind of nuts and bolts knowledge, Willis set out to establish a center where people could learn how non-architectural factors–land values, real estate cycles, building codes, zoning–induced the unrelentingly vertical profile of our major cities. Well aware that downsizing and corporate relocation had impacted the real estate dynamics in lower Manhattan, Willis set her sights on the financial district.
“I realized there was so much vacant space and that if I said, `Here’s what I have in mind, wouldn’t you like to provide me your vacant commercial space for six months or so to kick off the idea of the museum?,’ somebody would give me some for free.”
“From the beginning, I thought of this project in phases, that we would use this first to try to raise money for a substantial institution. Then, (after) we get public support in terms of visitor, and private and corporate funding, we will do other shows that then expand the horizons of the museum. It won’t just be about New York, it will be New York, Chicago, America and then the world.”
The museum’s opening exhibition, “Downtown New York; The Architecture of Business/The Business of Buildings” takes visitors through a series of displays that examine such issues as location and height, address the roles of developers, contractors and construction workers, and trace the evolution of the office (from the small, window-hugging suites of 1910 to the fluorescent-lit, open plans of modernism).
And while the photographs, models, blueprints and drawings help one understand a building from the inside out, Willis knows that they are but intimation of the real thing. “I always say, the museum is the point of orientation and New York is the exhibit. This is the place where you come in, learn about the forces that shaped these building and this district, then when you go outside and look at them, you’ll understand them better.”
Although the project has gotten off to a good start, with support from The Real Estate Board of New York and a handful of foundations, Willis’ project remains a temporary entity.
If the museum is to succeed it must establish a strong institutional identity, formed in part by a recognizable facade, a permanent address. “But if that doesn’t work out,” says Willis “I can envision a sort of peripatetic existence where you occupy a space for three or four months.” Convinced she’ll manage to find quarters elsewhere if need be, Willis has yet to receive any other offers.
Which makes one wonder: like a high rise that breaks ground in a boom and tops off in a recession, might The Skyscraper Museum find itself coming along a little too late? After all, according to Carl Weisbrod, president of the Alliance of Downtown New York (which seeks to make the area more than just a 9-to-5 business district by promoting residential and tourist enterprises), commercial vacancies have fallen from around 25 percent in early 1994 to near 17 percent today. With landlords able to rent space, why would they offer it gratis–or even at a reduced rate–to Willis.
“I’m not terribly worried about that,” claims Weisbrod, who is supporting Willis’ venture. “We have over 100 million square feet of commercial office space here. There’s a substantial amount of vacant space that will not be totally absorbed in the near future.”
Richard Kaplan, an architect and co-chair of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, a family philanthropy that has supported The Skyscraper Museum, expresses admiration for Willis’ vision, but admits she’s got a tough row to hoe. “I think it’s very shrewd on her part to do it this way, to raise $5,000 or $10,000 here and there for this exhibition, rather than $10 million for a permanent space.
“Once people see what she’s done, I think the idea will be much easier to pull off. Still, I don’t think Carol’s lot is an easy one. I don’t think where she is now is going to go unrented for very long. Downtown is beginning to get the development fever. Eventually, she’s going to get the heave-ho.”
