Located on the first three levels of a Midtown Manhattan’s 928 8th Avenue, Adjaye Associates’ Spyscape is part museum and part interactive funhouse, showcasing the espionage world’s stories, tools and characters and offering visitor challenges that range from surveillance skills to special ops training.
Adjaye, which developed Spyscape’s architectural, exhibition, and even fixture design, worked closely with advisors like museum officials, former intelligence agency directors, and ex-hackers, creating a complex that immerses you in the mystery, intrigue, smarts, and subterfuge of spying.
The multi-level museum’s labyrinthine exhibition spaces are organized around seven spy-related themes, including encryption, surveillance, deception and hacking. Within each you meet key characters related to the subject (like Robert Hanson, a notorious mole for the KGB, and Virginia Hall, the one-legged spy who fled the Nazis over the Pyrenees), peruse artifacts (like dominoes with tools hidden inside, spy plane cameras, and code-protecting Enigma Machines from WWII), and take part in a related skill challenge (like lie detection and interrogation practice and the Special Ops laser tunnel, in which you duck and jump over laser beams to prove your dexterity.)
David Adjaye's design for the Spyscape interior
Visitors each receive an identity band, tracking their progress, and their experience ends with a debrief, analyzing their skillset and suggesting what spy-related roles they could hold.
Until you reach that debrief you advance from room to room, inundated with visual stimuli intended to overwhelm you, intrigue you, make you feel watched, and hint at what’s to come, like cuts between floors, peeks into other galleries, translucent screens, smoked glass windows and doors, and varied lighting, ranging from flashing LEDs to traditional museum lighting. Sinister, shadowy finishes and fixtures include dark fiber cement walls, gray acoustic paneling, stainless steel kiosks, and reflective black linoleum and polished concrete floors, sometimes imbedded with LEDs.
A few galleries stand alone, like a raised timber viewing platform and the surveillance pavilion, a weathered steel drum filled with programmable surveillance technology. The museum also holds event spaces, offices, a bookstore, and, of course, a spy gift shop.
‘It’s a very different take on what a museum is,’ says Adjaye Associates’ Josh Ellman. ‘People are engaged rather than just consuming information passively.’ The firm’s kinetic, foreboding, engrossing design, and the sense that you’re being tracked, drive home the chilling point that espionage these days isn’t just limited to spies. Corporations, governments, and just about everyone else is doing it too.
‘We show how the world of espionage is all around you,’ notes Shelby Prichard, Spyscape’s US chief of staff.
The interior architecture has been developed by Adjaye to include exhibition spaces, event spaces, offices, a bookstore, and, of course, a spy gift shop
Sinister, shadowy finishes and fixtures include dark fiber cement walls, gray acoustic paneling, stainless steel kiosks, and reflective black linoleum and polished concrete floors
The architecture invites intrigue with cuts between floors, peeks into other galleries, translucent screens and smoked glass windows
INFORMATION
For more information, visit the David Adjaye Associates website and the Spyscape website
ADDRESS
Spyscape
928 8th Ave
New York
NY 10019
USA
-
Tiffany & Co’s artist mentorship at Frieze London puts creative exchange centre stageAt Frieze London 2025, Tiffany & Co partners with the fair’s Artist-to-Artist initiative, expanding its reach and reaffirming the value of mentorship within the global art community
-
'They're like my friends:’ Max Lamb exhibits a decade of chairs in a former church hallThe British designer’s new London show, ‘Exercises in Seating' (until 2 November 2025), brings together over 30 diverse works in a circle of connection
-
A postmodernist home reborn: we tour the British embassy in BrazilWe tour the British Embassy in Brazil after its thorough renovation by Hersen Mendes Arquitetura, which breathes new life into a postmodernist structure within the country's famous modernist capital
-
Ballman Khaplova creates a light-filled artist’s studio in upstate New YorkThis modest artist’s studio provides a creative with an atelier and office in the grounds of an old farmhouse, embedding her practice in the surrounding landscape
-
The most important works of modernist landscape architecture in the USModernist landscapes quite literally grew alongside the modern architecture movement. Field specialist and advocate Charles A. Birnbaum takes us on a tour of some of the finest examples
-
Jeanne Gang’s single malt whisky decanter offers a balance ‘between utility and beauty’The architect’s whisky decanter, 'Artistry in Oak', brings a sculptural dimension to Gordon & MacPhail's single malt
-
This perfectly cubed house sits atop a hill in Hudson ValleyForma’s ‘House on a Hill’ resembled a black wooden box – all straight lines and sharp angles against the rolling backdrop of New York State
-
An idyllic slice of midcentury design, the 1954 Norton House has gone on the marketNorton House in Pasadena, carefully crafted around its sloping site by Buff, Straub & Hensman, embodies the Californian ideal of the suburban modern house embedded within a private landscape
-
Herzog & de Meuron and Piet Oudolf unveil Calder Gardens in PhiladelphiaThe new cultural landmark presents Alexander Calder’s work in dialogue with nature and architecture, alongside the release of Jacques Herzog’s 'Sketches & Notes'. Ellie Stathaki interviews Herzog about the project.
-
Meet Studio Zewde, the Harlem practice that's creating landscapes 'rooted in cultural narratives, ecology and memory'Ahead of a string of prestigious project openings, we check in with firm founder Sara Zewde
-
The best of California desert architecture, from midcentury gems to mirrored dwellingsWhile architecture has long employed strategies to cool buildings in arid environments, California desert architecture developed its own distinct identity –giving rise, notably, to a wave of iconic midcentury designs
