HOUSING DENSITY

Urbanists! How much do you know about New York housing history? Take the 5-pair DENSITY CHALLENGE to see which housing types—tenements or towers—housed the greatest density a century ago to today. The interactive site reveals surprising numbers of high and low population density and low lot coverage of New York’s key housing typologies. The Density Diagrams summarize findings of The Skyscraper Museum’s current exhibition HOUSING DENSITY: From Tenements to Towers, open through December 2019.

Take the DENSITY CHALLENGE or view the virtual exhibition for complete context.

The new exhibition at The Skyscraper Museum, HOUSING DENSITY: From Tenements to Towers, sorts out different meanings of density and reveals some surprising histories that have shaped the way we live and build in New York City today. A two-track show that combines history and analysis, HOUSING DENSITY examines the basic, binary approaches to residential development in New York in the twentieth century: private and public, or publicly-assisted, housing. Guest curators for the exhibition are Nicholas Dagen Bloom, an urban historian who has written extensively on the history of public housing, and Matthias Altwicker, architect and professor at NYIT, who worked with students to create the analytical models for the installation.

The installation focuses attention on people and space—that is, on the density of population and in the relation of built density and open space—and displays models and graphics created for the exhibition that illustrate the scales of the individual apartment unit, the full building, and the neighborhood context. The two case-study neighborhoods analyzed, sections of West Chelsea and East Harlem, emphasize the contrasting strategies of private-market and public housing development models, both before and after the slum clearance movement at mid-century. The history of the Depression-era public housing models and the ideology of “towers in the park” urban renewal are examined in the show’s history sections.

About The Skyscraper Museum 
The Skyscraper Museum is located in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City at 39 Battery Place. The Museum celebrates the city’s rich architectural heritage and examines the historical forces and individuals that have shaped its successive skylines. Through exhibitions, programs, and publications, the Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence.