The design team at Sunnyside Studios has developed a new approach to the typology of recording studios, targeting cities where horizontal territorial expansion is unfeasible. Traditionally, studio complexes are conceived as vast grounds, composed of separate acoustic booths, each in its own building, connected by golf carts and an internal network of paths. However, this model requires land availability that New York does not offer.
The central principle guiding the project was to condense all the needs of a complex—including studios, production support, loading and unloading areas, parking, catering services, technical crew, and cast—within a single urban block, while maintaining the operational functionality inherent to larger complexes.
The first obstacle was programmatic: an industrial-use block needed to accommodate the full range of functions that a horizontal complex would distribute across multiple buildings. The architectural response was verticalization. Three pillar-free studios form the ground floor, while a five-story production center rises between them. This center houses offices, support spaces, and a versatile studio on the top floor, which also serves as an event venue, offering panoramic views of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
A facade with visual rhythm ensures that the building maintains a dialogue with the street, and its upper terraces promote a connection with the neighboring neighborhood. The internal organization of the structure is determined by the flow of equipment, technical crew, and cast through this compact and stacked volume.
The second challenge encountered was structural. Recording studios require large clear spans and substantial ceiling heights to allow for large-scale set creation, installation of suspended rigging systems, and free camera movement; any obstruction is detrimental to the usable floor area. Steel pillars interrupt this space, conventional masonry requires the manual placement of thousands of individual blocks, and traditional concrete walls, while providing the necessary strength and acoustic mass, require complex molds that must be continuously assembled, disassembled, and relocated until the final height is reached.
Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) emerged as the technical solution to this problem. The ICF system integrates structural concrete, continuous insulation, and acoustic performance into a single wall unit, resulting in robust, silent, and pillar-free volumes, as required by contemporary film production. These lightweight molds arrive pre-assembled, are opened and stacked like pieces of a puzzle; the steel reinforcement is inserted in place; and the concrete is poured in phases as new molds are added until the wall reaches its total height of 15 meters—a simple and replicable method that replaces a much more complicated conventional process.
Since the continuous insulation is incorporated into the wall itself, it becomes unnecessary to install an additional thermal insulation system before the external cladding, generating savings in time, labor, and materials across the combined surface area of the three studios.
The final result is a building designed to be a functional set: three pillar-free acoustic studios, fully equipped for cutting-edge Extended and Virtual Reality (XR/VR) workflows, integrated into a single block in New York, along with all the production infrastructure that a large complex demands.
