EMPIRE STATE BUILDING OBSERVATORY EXPERIENCE
ESRT | Experiential Design & Brand Narrative
NEW york | 2015-2019
The Empire State Building Observatory: Above Everything
The Empire State Building is not just a landmark. It is a living piece of mythology — one that four million people a year travel from every corner of the world to experience in person. The question at the heart of this project was both simple and enormous: what should it feel like to be inside it?
For the building's $165 million Observatory renovation, I served as creative consultant across the full visitor journey, from the first floor to the 102nd. Working alongside ownership, senior Observatory leadership, and an exceptional multidisciplinary team, I brought a unified creative perspective to a project where architecture, storytelling, technology, and emotion had to operate as a single coherent experience. The goal was not to reimagine the Empire State Building but to make its cultural legacy fully, viscerally felt — by every visitor, at every moment, on every floor.
The result is an experience that feels both timeless and entirely of now.
TEAM
THINC Design
IDEO
Squint/Opera
Corgan
The Lighting Practice
Kubik/Maltbie
JLL
Skanska
Tenguerian Architectural Models












