Starrett Brothers built the Empire State Building by overlapping phases

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.

Ran demolition, design, and construction concurrently across site zones, exploiting that dependencies were local, not global, so work never waited for a whole phase.

Starting construction on some parts while demolition continued elsewhere kept work moving continuously.

Steel erection on lower floors began before upper-floor design was final, so design changes only affected later work.

Detailed coordination prevented collisions between parallel workstreams, avoiding the chaos that strict sequencing avoids.

The compressed timeline proved that many dependencies were local, not global, so overlap was safe.

When a deadline is impossible under a standard sequence, map where dependencies are local, not global, and run those workstreams in parallel.

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.