Empire State Building

An iconic piece of the city

Our project to create a new visitor experience for this global icon was born from the clients’ realisation that, in taking the elevator from ground floor to the high-level viewing platform, millions of visitors would emerge into daylight, amazed by what they saw. And what they saw was everything but the Empire State…

A sense of time and place…

The brief was clear — give visitors a real sense of place, a sense of how this breathtaking building came to be and, most important of all, how it continues to function today.

Starting from first principles we studied the visitor route from street to sky and made some critical moves, some of them quite unexpected. Like moving the entrance from 5th Avenue to West 34th Street to improve flow and avoid congestion.

Inside the building we opened up additional floors and designed a series of immersive exhibits to transport visitors through the building's history as a wonder of the modern world: its innovative and rapid construction process, its grand opening in 1931, its continued leadership in energy efficiency to this day, and its role as an urban campus that provides singular amenities for its occupants.

Capturing the building’s essential character

Visitors experience the building as an icon of popular culture: whether in movies, broadcast media, comics or commercials, the Empire State Building stands for New York City in the popular imagination.

The exhibits plunge visitors directly into an epic scene with King Kong himself, while also giving them a taste of the building's many other starring moments on the silver screen.

The experience captures the building’s essential character, its place in the cityscape of New York, and its place in cultural history.

A collaboration

The renewed Empire State Building experience was completed with contributions from Beneville Studios, IDEO, Squint/Opera, and a host of other consultants and production partners.