A Short History of the Highrise

A Short History of the Highrise is an interactive documentary that explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world. The centerpiece of the project is four short films. The first three (“Mud,” “Concrete” and “Glass”) draw on the New York Times’s extraordinary visual archives, a repository of millions of photographs that have largely been unseen in decades. Each film is intended to evoke a chapter in a storybook, with rhyming narration and photographs brought to life with intricate animation. The fourth chapter (“Home”) comprises images submitted by the public. The interactive experience incorporates the films and, like a visual accordion, allows viewers to dig deeper into the project’s themes with additional archival materials, text and miniature games. On tablets, viewers can navigate the story extras and special features within the films using touch commands like swipe, pinch, pull and tap. On desktop and laptop computers, users can mouse over features and click to navigate. Smartphone users can view the four films.

This project was created for Op-Docs, the New York Times editorial department’s forum for short, opinionated documentaries, and is part of the National Film Board of Canada’s ongoing Highrise project, an Emmy Award-winning multiyear, many-media collaborative documentary experiment.