FormFollowsFinance

Carol Willis is the founder, director and curator of the Skyscraper Museum in New York. As an architectural and urban historian, she has researched, taught and written about the history of American urbanism. Since founding the museum in 1997, she has presented thirty exhibitions on historical and contemporary, local and global themes. These include: The Twin Towers and the Twentieth Century, The Rise of Wall Street, SKY HIGH & the Logic of Luxury, Ten & Taller: Manhattan 1874-1900, SKYLINE, Housing Density, and most recently SUPERTALL and Residential Rising: Lower Manhattan since 9/11.

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Carol Willis is also Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Columbia University, where she teaches in the programme The Shape of Two Cities. She is the author of the award-winning book Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) and editor of Building the Empire State (W.W. Norton, 1998). She appears regularly in documentary films and radio programmes for The History Channel, PBS, BBC Television, NPR and BBC World Service Radio, among others. Mrs Willis lives with her husband Mark Willis, an economist, in a skyscraper in the centre of Manhattan.