British architect David Adjaye has completed work on New York’s museum of spying, which invites its first visitors to become undercover agents this weekend.
Opening today, the interactive Spyscape museum occupies a renovated 60,000-square-foot (5,574-square-metre) building on West 55th Street in Midtown Manhattan, just two blocks away from MoMA.
Adjaye’s firm consulted former members of renowned hacking collectives, station chiefs and directors of intelligence agencies for help with the design, which was revealed late last year.
Inside, weathering steel drums are installed to house themed exhibition focused on surveillance, hacking, deception and intelligence operations. A mix of smoked glass, bespoke fibre cement, grey acoustic paneling, mirror-polished steel and dim lighting were chosen for surrounding spaces to create a dark and mysterious atmosphere.
In these areas, Spyscape offers a multi-sensory interactive experience where visitors can pretend to be spies. The adventure starts on arrival, when each is presented with an Identity Band? that is used to track their journey with electromagnetic fields
A video playing in the museum’s central theatre offers a briefing on secret intelligence, before players are assigned one of 11 spy roles – including agent handler, cryptologist, hacker, or intelligence analyst.
Following activities take place in an interrogation booth, with detectors to “learn the art and science of spotting lies”, and a room with a 360-degree projection of live and pre-recorded CCTV imagery that mimics a surveillance mission. Visitors are also timed as they creep through a room of laser tunnels.
David Adjaye’s Spyscape museum of espionage opens in New York [DeZeen]