Wildflower Studios

• 760,000 sq ft vertical film studio
• 11 stacked sound stages
• Built on a 5-acre urban site

BIG designed Wildflower Studios as a vertically stacked film studio on a tight five-acre industrial site in Queens, reorganizing eleven large-span sound stages into two stacked levels around a central spine, a layout with no direct precedent to copy from.

To develop and test that stacking concept, along with the pleated, two-toned precast facade that wraps the building, BIG's team used Rhino and Grasshopper to build parametric models of the massing and facade panel pattern, letting them iterate quickly on how the folds in the envelope would bring daylight into the central street and vary the facade rhythm across long blank walls.

Revit, connected through Rhino.Inside.Revit, kept that parametric geometry tied to a coordinated BIM model, while Enscape and V-Ray were used to visualize the studio village concept for the client and project stakeholders.

BIG faced a tight, unconventional site: only five acres in Astoria, Queens, to hold eleven sound stages that each needed roughly 150 by 120 feet of clear span and generous ceiling height for production trucks and rigging, a program that would normally require ten times the land if built the conventional single-story way. The site also sits in a flood-prone zone along the East River, so critical production space had to be lifted above grade while still keeping efficient truck access at ground level.

Stacking the stages solved the land constraint but introduced new problems: getting daylight and a sense of orientation into a deep, two-level stack of enormous windowless boxes, keeping structural spans clear for grip and rigging equipment, and wrapping eleven stacked volumes in a facade that would read as more than a blank industrial shed while still being buildable in economical precast concrete.

Resolving those interlocking constraints by hand, without a way to quickly test many massing and facade options together, would have been extremely difficult.

Traditional film and TV sound stages are built as single-story, horizontally sprawling sheds, since production teams generally expect to load large sets, trucks, and equipment straight onto one flat floor. Working out a design the conventional way, by hand-drafting or modeling each stage as a standalone horizontal volume, would have made it nearly impossible to fit eleven large-span stages, each 150 by 120 feet, onto a five-acre urban site in Queens.

Without a parametric approach, the design team would have had to manually redraw the massing and facade every time the stacking arrangement changed, making it far slower to test how a vertical, two-level studio layout could still give every stage the large-span height and truck access it needed.

Using Rhino and Grasshopper to drive the parametric massing let BIG's team resolve the stacking and facade challenges in a fraction of the time a manual workflow would have taken. Instead of redrawing eleven stages by hand every time the arrangement changed, the design team could adjust a handful of parameters and instantly see how the stack, the central spine, and the facade pleating responded, so many more configurations could be tested before committing to a final scheme.

Keeping that geometry linked to Revit through Rhino.Inside.Revit meant the coordinated BIM model stayed in sync with the parametric studies instead of requiring separate, error-prone rebuilding, which reduced coordination time and design risk as the project moved toward construction documentation.

Enscape and V-Ray let the team generate accurate visualizations of the stacked studio concept quickly, which helped communicate a genuinely unusual massing strategy to the client and stakeholders and secure buy-in without lengthy back-and-forth.

The net result was a 760,000-square-foot facility with eleven stacked sound stages successfully delivered on a five-acre urban site that could not have accommodated that program using a conventional horizontal layout, with the parametric workflow directly enabling both the design efficiency and the coordination needed to build it.