GLUCK+ Compresses a Film Studio Campus Onto One New York Block

A 350,000-square-foot soundstage complex on a single urban block is GLUCK+'s answer to a city that can't build studio campuses the Hollywood way. Sunnyside Studios, completed in 2025 in New York, rethinks what a film and television production facility looks like when land can't spread horizontally.

Peter L. Gluck and Stacie Wong led the design as lead architects, with photography by Here and Now Agency. The building's insulated concrete forms come from manufacturer Nudura ICF.

Why the traditional soundstage model fails in New York

Studio campuses are typically conceived as backlots: individual soundstage boxes, each its own building, linked by golf carts and an interior street network. That model depends on land New York City doesn't have.

"The key concept driving the project was to compress everything a campus needs — stages, production support, loading, parking, catering, crew, and talent onto a single urban block without losing the operational logic that makes a campus work," the architects said in their project description.

That's the design problem in a nutshell. Sprawling campuses like those in Los Angeles treat horizontal distance as a free resource. In New York, every foot of ground is expensive and contested. So GLUCK+ stacked the program vertically while preserving the workflows that productions depend on.

What does this change for film production in New York?

In practice, it means a production can find its stages, support spaces, loading docks, parking, catering, and crew and talent areas inside one building rather than across a sprawling site. The operational logic of a campus — the reason producers like backlots in the first place — survives the compression.

The project's significance goes beyond one building. New York has spent years chasing film and television production work, and the shortage of purpose-built stage space has been a persistent constraint. A vertically organized facility on a single block offers a template that other dense cities could copy where the backlot model physically cannot fit.

The choice of Nudura ICF as the manufacturer points to the practical demands of the typology. Soundstages need thick, acoustically robust envelopes, and insulated concrete forms deliver that performance while supporting the fast construction schedules urban infill sites usually demand.

Sunnyside Studios arrives as demand for content production space in New York keeps growing, and it suggests the next wave of studio construction in dense cities will look less like a campus and more like a machine — one where everything a production needs sits within a single block's footprint.