#403 1930 · Starrett Brothers and Eken / Empire State Building · Constructionredesign-the-moment
A skyscraper deadline was too tight to finish the design, then demolish the old building, then build — so the contractors stopped waiting for each phase to end and ran all three at once.
the problem
a project's standard sequence of dependent phases makes the total timeline impossible to hit, but each phase seems to genuinely require the one before it to finish first
background
Empire State Building's construction faced an extraordinarily tight roughly 13-month deadline driven by competitive pressure in New York's late-1920s skyscraper race, a timeline the conventional construction sequence — finalize the full architectural design, demolish the existing Waldorf-Astoria hotel on the site, then begin building — made essentially impossible to hit. Each phase appeared to genuinely require the prior one to be complete: how could foundation work begin before demolition finished, or steel erection begin before the upper-floor design was locked?
Contractors Starrett Brothers and Eken, rather than accept the sequential timeline as fixed, mapped out a detailed set of deliberately overlapping schedules — treating the project's phases not as a strict chain but as parallel workstreams that could run concurrently wherever the actual physical and design dependencies allowed, rather than wherever convention assumed they had to be separate.
the move
Construction began on portions of the site while demolition and excavation were still underway on other portions, and steel erection on the lower floors started before final specifications for the upper floors had been completed — foundation work began March 17, 1930, the first structural steel went up April 7, and by June 20 steel had already risen to the 26th floor, all while design and site-clearing work for later stages continued in parallel elsewhere on the project.
the payoff
The building topped out at 1,048 feet by September 19, 1930 — just 23 weeks after construction began — finishing significantly ahead of an already extraordinarily aggressive schedule, with peak steel-erection weeks placing roughly 22 stories of steel in 22 working days, a pace conventional sequential scheduling would not have made possible.
what came after
The Empire State Building's overlapping-phase construction schedule remains a foundational case study in construction management and project scheduling for deliberately parallelizing phases assumed to be strictly sequential, and the same underlying technique — fast-tracking, where design, procurement and construction run concurrently rather than in a strict waterfall — is now standard practice across major infrastructure and skyscraper projects worldwide when deadlines make the conventional sequence impossible.
references
- [1]How the Empire State Building's Construction Remains a WonderBuilt by Bluebeam, 2021blog.bluebeam.com
- [2]The 'Race Into the Sky' That Built the Empire State BuildingEngineering News-Record, 2021enr.com