Carol Willis is the founder, director, and curator of The Skyscraper Museum. An architecture and urban historian, she has researched, taught, and written about the history of American city building. She is the author of Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (Princeton Architectural Press, 1995: 2008), which received an AIA book award and was named "Best Book on North American Urbanism, 1995" by the Urban History Association. 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 and Planning. From 1979 to 1991 she taught courses on the history of architecture at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Critic Herbert Muschamp has praised 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."
