When Bent Flyvbjerg says “big things,” he means big things. The Danish economic geographer is an expert on megaprojects, and he starts his new book—cowritten with Dan Gardner—with a story about one of the most literally high-profile examples of one: the Empire State Building. Built under budget and on schedule—in scarcely over a year—during the Great Depression, the most famous skyscraper in the world is a textbook illustration of Flyvbjerg’s go-to rule for getting big things done, as he explains in this excerpt from “How Big Things Get Done:”
Working closely with the project’s builders and engineers, [architect William] Lamb developed designs shaped by the site and the need to stay on budget and schedule. “The adaptation of the design to condition of use, construction and speed of erection has been kept to the fore throughout the development of the drawings of the Empire State,” he wrote. The designs were rigorously tested to ensure that they would work. “Hardly a detail was issued without having been thoroughly analyzed by the builders and their experts and adjusted and changed to meet every foreseen delay.”
In a 1931 publication, the [building] corporation boasted that before any work had been done on the construction site “the architects knew exactly how many beams and of what lengths, even how many rivets and bolts would be needed. They knew how many windows Empire State would have, how many blocks of limestone, and of what shapes and sizes, how many tons of aluminum and stainless steel, tons of cement, tons of mortar. Even before it was begun, Empire State was finished entirely—on paper.”
The Empire State Building had been estimated to cost $50 million. It actually cost $41 million ($679 million in 2021). That’s 17 percent under budget, or $141 million in 2021 dollars. Construction finished several weeks before the opening ceremony.
I call the pattern followed by the Empire State Building and other successful projects “Think slow, act fast.”
