Speakers

Carol Willis is the founder, director, and curator of The Skyscraper Museum. An architectural and urban historian, she has researched, taught, and written about the history of American city building and is a leading scholar of skyscraper history. She is the author of numerous publications, including Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), which was named "Best Book on North American Urbanism" that year by the Urban History Association. Critic Herbert Muschamp praised Ms. Willis in The New York Times as "the brilliant and energetic woman who created the Skyscraper Museum in 1996 from nothing but her imagination, her passion for New York architecture, and her belief in the importance of history and the value of the public realm."

Ms. Willis is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University where since 1989 she has taught in the program The Shape of Two Cities: New York and Paris in The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning. She frequently lectures at conferences and universities around the world and appears regularly in television documentaries and radio broadcasts, including programs for The History Channel, PBS, BBC Television, NPR, CNN International, and BBC World Service Radio.

Before establishing The Skyscraper Museum, Ms. Willis was guest curator for exhibits on the architects Raymond Hood and Hugh Ferriss. In conjunction with the exhibit Hugh Ferriss: Metropolis, she edited the facsimile reprint of the delineator’s 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow and added a historical essay (published by Princeton Architectural Press; reprinted in 1998). Willis is the editor for Building the Empire State, a book on the construction of New York's signature skyscraper, published by W.W. Norton in 1998 and still in print. She has written introductions to numerous monographs and collections, including Skyscraper Rivals, New York Architecture, Manhattan Skyscrapers, and New York Deco.

At The Skyscraper Museum, she has curated more than 30 exhibitions including Building the Empire State, Design Development: Times Square, Green Towers for New York, Giants: The Twin Towers and the Twentieth Century, World’s Tallest Building: Burj Dubai, The Rise of Wall Street, SuperTall!, News Paper Spires, SKY HIGH, Garden City | Mega City, Ten & Taller: 1874 -1900, Housing Density, Sky Marks, Landmarks, and TALL TIMBER: The Future of Cities in Wood.

Ms. Willis majored in Art History at Boston University, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1971. She did her graduate work in architectural history at Columbia University in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, receiving an M.A. in 1976 and M.Phil. in 1979. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards. She was elected a Fellow of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (2021) and was awarded the CTBUH Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023.

Ms. Willis lives in a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan with her husband Mark Willis, an urban economist.