New York State Office of General Services (OGS) has released Reconnect the Empire State Plaza, a new vision plan developed with WXY channeled feedback from agency and community stakeholders to guide the future of one of the country’s most significant works of modernist civic architecture.

For WXY, the project takes on a question that reaches well beyond Albany. Many of the major civic landscapes inherited from the twentieth century were designed at an extraordinary scale and with equally sweeping assumptions about how people should move through cities. Today, their architectural significance is inseparable from making them more connected, useful, and welcoming without losing the qualities that make them distinctive.

At Empire State Plaza, WXY approached that question through both design and public engagement. Working with New York State, the team collaborated with OGS to lead a six-month visioning process involving more than 2,000 residents, state workers, community leaders, and other stakeholders. That conversation shaped a series of proposals focused on the places where the Plaza meets Albany, including its streets, entrances, pedestrian connections, landscapes, and gathering spaces.

The work also requires confronting the conditions under which the Plaza was created. Its construction displaced more than 7,000 residents and severed parts of Albany’s existing street network. Rather than treating that history as separate from the design process, the vision plan considers how interpretation, public space, and new connections can make it more visible as the site changes.

As Claire Weisz, Founding Principal of WXY, describes it, the challenge is to preserve the Plaza’s architectural character while renewing its civic purpose. That means working with a monumental existing place rather than against it, finding targeted interventions that can change how people arrive, move, gather, and spend time there.

“The Empire State Plaza is an extraordinary achievement of mid-century architecture, but also a remnant of the era’s top-down urban planning policies that in practice reinforced separation rather than connection,” said Claire Weisz, Founding Principal of WXY. "The question at the heart of this project was how to turn a symbol of division into a place that brings people together. Our design strategies, developed through deep engagement with the Albany community, seek to preserve and celebrate the Plaza's unique historical character, while reviving its civic purpose with new ways for people to arrive, enjoy, and gather as part of everyday life.”

The release of the vision plan marks the beginning of that next phase. WXY is continuing the work through a comprehensive master plan and design for nearer-term pedestrian-focused enhancements, including Swan Street, Madison Avenue, the Downtown Connector, the Central Plaza, and a new wayfinding strategy.

“This work was possible because of the extraordinary partnership with the New York State Office of General Services and the Office of Strategic Planning,” said David Vega-Barachowitz, Director of Urban Design at WXY. “The catalyst projects operate as a coordinated system to calm traffic, clarify wayfinding, and introduce landscape where hardscape dominates. Together they reshape how people move through the Plaza and its edges, improving safety, legibility, and the experience of the site.”

For WXY, Empire State Plaza adds to a broader body of work centered on a deceptively simple proposition. The future of public space often begins with learning how to make the places we already have work better.