Chrysler Building
Work in a Work of Art.
In 2017, Tishman Speyer engaged Breakaway to market five available floors within one of the most iconic assets in their portfolio. The opportunity was genuinely rare: a prospective tenant could occupy a building within the building, with their own private entrance, street-level signage, and direct access to Grand Central. The campaign's job was to signal to premium brokers and tenants that Tishman Speyer was actively marketing the space and that the opportunity matched the prestige of the address.
As the sole designer on the project, I developed a visual identity system built around the Chrysler Building's own architectural vocabulary. Rather than leaning on the building's fame alone, the creative drew directly from its details: the radiating terraced crown and spire, the intricate wood marquetry of the elevator banks, and the geometric ornament of the Art Deco lobby. These references were abstracted into a suite of custom patterns that ran across every deliverable, creating a system that felt specific to the building rather than generic to commercial real estate.
The identity included a custom logotype, typography system, brand icon, and tonal color palette designed to complement both interior photography and exterior architecture. Deliverables spanned print and digital advertising, an email campaign, and a single-page website whose front end I designed and oversaw through development with a build partner.
The most considered deliverable was the broker desk drop: a custom decanter with branded packaging carrying the custom patterns throughout. The intent was to give brokers something that felt like a piece of the building's history, a conversation-starting object that reinforced the campaign's central argument that this wasn't just office space, it was a landmark.
The same pattern system extended to custom pocket squares for the sales team, giving everyone representing the space a tangible expression of the brand they were selling.
In 2018, flexible workspace provider Spaces signed a 15-year lease for approximately 111,000 square feet across three floors of the Chrysler Building, including a private entrance on 42nd Street — one of the key features the campaign was built around. While a direct attribution between the marketing campaign and the lease isn't something we can claim, the deal validated both the positioning and the audience the work was designed to reach.
Client: Tishman Speyer
Agency: Breakaway
Creative Director: Scott Maney
Copy: Nik Skogsberg
Lead Designer: Courtney Perti