Published December 2008, Wallpaper*
It’s 1967. And David Rockwell is a New Jersey boy
who loves community theater and the beach, probably in that order. His mother
and stepfather are a vaudeville dancer and a business entrepeneur, in charge of
four older boys, and that year seems like a good year to get out of Deal. ‘My
father decided to sell the house and within eight weeks of talking about moving
we were in a station wagon driving to Guadelajara, Mexico,’ says Rockwell,
telling this one of a hundred stories on a hot August afternoon in his Union
Square office. David Rockwell is all about stories.
‘That was the best way to move,’ he continues. It’s
good to know he was happy, but this isn’t a story about relocation and how it
affects the family. This is a story about how David Rockwell, now 52, makes the
playful, engaging, literally theatrical (in that it has to do with theater and
its cuts and scenes and stages and transitions) architecture he does, and maybe
even why.
‘It was all public space,’ he says of that first trip. ‘All of the life happened in marketplaces, and in the space between different buildings.’ Rockwell is looking back in what he calls the ‘rearview mirror’ of his life and filing all the events into a narrative that can explain his work today. And it’s clear, looking at Rockwell’s colorful, often outsized and always entertaining work, that this first introduction to public space, and that eleven-year-old’s observation that most of the interesting stuff happens on the periphery and in the places between, that he has been working and re-working that idea ever since.
Another memory lines up just then, of his first
trip to New York, just a week before this station wagon drive across the
country. His stepfather took David and his brothers to the city for sundaes at
Schrafft’s and Fiddler on the Roof
at the Imperial Theater. ‘You look back on things and put them into categories
that makes sense now,’ Rockwell says. ‘And they were both unbelievably communal
in a way I’d never experienced, and they were both a kind of storytelling.’
Storytelling is what it’s all about. Rockwell’s
architecture takes stories and tells stories, projecting his own interests onto
combinations of wood and stone and glass and pictures until those physical decisions
– in the case of the new JetBlue terminal at JFK, to create a central public
arena with restaurants off to the side; in the case of the Aloft hotel chain,
to treat the check-in desk as the stage manager’s home - begin projecting
themselves outwards into ever-increasing numbers of narratives and
possibilities and themes. The JetBlue building is, in part, about the strange
ballet of the crowd in transit; Aloft about the theatre of the roadside motel. ‘When
I started, I thought I was having a conversation,’ he says of his relationship
with architecture. ‘Now I know I’m extracting a narrative.’
Rockwell’s a fast learner. It took one project –
the Sushi Zen restaurant he did on founding Rockwell Group in 1984 – for the
architect to realize that what he was interested in was way beyond the way
designers put shapes together. ‘I shaped the sushi bar like a lightning bolt
because I thought ‘Why are sushi bars not social?’’ he says. ‘The lightning
bolt created these areas where people could gather.’ Sushi Zen was the place
where Rockwell tried those fifteen ideas every student graduates architecture
school (Syracuse in Rockwell’s case) with, and where he discovered that all of
them worked.
Twenty-four years later – heading a 250-strong
firm with and a few Nobus, sports stadia, W hotels, A Cirque de Soleil building
at Walt Disney World in Florida, stage sets for Hair Spray, The Rocky Horror
Show and Team America: World Police, the Kodak Theatre in LA and whole lot more
behind them - not all of his ideas have hit the mark. The bold young architect
who did as much as he could to announce himself with a midtown sushi restaurant
– while exploring choreography, procession, the play of people in space - is
still in there, but he’s older, wiser, able to compromise.
‘You have to be willing to start over,’ Rockwell
says. ‘You have to be able to rip it up.’ He’s talking now about the project he
did for the Venice Biennale, a double-screened installation playing in the
darkened entryway to the Corderie dell'Arsenale. There were ideas floating
around before: a group of boxes, chocolate and wine, a popcorn machine. And
then there were other ideas – about curved screens, that sense of procession,
killer movie scenes – and those were the ones that came together.
This is the project that makes Rockwell dance on
an August afternoon. It is, essentially, two fifteen-foot-long curved screens
programmed with a motion sensor that captures your presence as you walk between
them and turns a field of dots into a layer of fractal planes, each one
projecting a scene from one of twenty-six movies cult-y in the architecture
world. The longer you stand, the larger the planes get, turning the image from
an abstract group of moving shapes into a towering column of Dorothy in The
Wizard of Oz or Keanu Reeves in The
Matrix. A conceptual
collaboration with design ‘brokers’ Reed Kroloff and Casey Jones, it’s all been
done by a team that includes Thomas Haggerty, Rockwell’s long-term right-hand
man Tucker Viemeister (although he’s got a lot of right-hand men like
principals Ed Bakos and Barry Richards) and Craig Negoescu, a sound designer
just in from Austin armed with a laptop and the conviction that computers are
talking to us, and by Josh Walton and James Tichenor, who work in the Lab, one
of the Rockwell Group’s subsidiaries (and as the name suggests, where the group
gets experimental and inter-disciplinary), oh, and by Zach Gage, a freelancer
who in the end figured out how to make it all happen. That kind of extra kick
works around here.
‘This is fucking great,’ Rockwell says before he
shimmies. But there’s a concern passed along the grapevine that people might
trip on the monitors installed behind the screens, their semi-secret presence
as much a part of the project as the explosive screens. Throughout the day,
Rockwell cycles through some options. Tape on the floor around the bottom seems
to be too much of a frame, changing the monitors from something visitors will
feel they’ve accidentally stumbled onto into an elevated piece of Art. Paint
has the same problem. Someone finds a little flashlight and puts it under one
of the monitors, giving it just enough of a glow so a five- and
eighty-five-year-old could see the wires. That’s probably the best option. Yes.
Let’s do it.
That final decision is something Rockwell is
happy to do. That moment of commitment – deciding that this building will look
like this or this one will look like this – is something that he’s comfortable
with, but he explores a different side of things with his theater projects. It’s
a good fit. ‘It turns out what most directors are interested in is transitions,’
he says. ‘The trick isn’t the permanent picture.’ What is it then? ‘It’s how
you get from one place to another,’ he explains. ‘Which is very similar to what
I’m interested in in spaces.’ He’s working on the stage set for the George C.
Wolfe-directed play Free Man of Color and at a studio meeting in his New York office – everything happens
in studios, which is how the office divides its designers into semi-autonomous
teams – Rockwell talks to his architects the way a teacher does. ‘The other
thing we could do...,’ he says. ‘Have you thought about…?’ He jumps from
talking about the play’s dividing proscenium to a meeting about Nobu Doha, one
of a big series of projects Rockwell’s doing for the restaurant-turned-hotel,
and it’s the same approach. Rockwell picks up a shiny piece of rippled metal,
then turns to the plan pinned up on the wall. ‘This is beautiful,’ he says. ‘Is
it accurate?’ Let’s play, but it’s for real.
Rockwell is a long way from a snowy night in
Syracuse when his architecture professor took him up on the roof of Slocum Hall
and they looked down at the paths left by traveling students and noticed they
all ran in gentle curves, that no one really walks in a straight line, a
realization that shows up now in Venice’s sin curve of a layout. He’s a long
way from the first Nobu, which opened in 1994 in Tribeca, a restaurant that,
with its bright wood, branching trunks, and hand-stenciled cherry blossoms, set
the tone for casual elite to the point that the restaurant almost become a
shorthand of itself, and Rockwell’s a long way from that eleven-year-old boy
who showed up in Mexico and realized that something very interesting was going
on.
He’s also a long way from being pinned down, captured, defined. Rockwell has surrounded himself with a group of people who support the way he thinks when they believe in it, and question the way he operates when they don’t. His ghost of a partner, Marc Hacker, creates flowcharts and word pictures that operate alongside Rockwell’s sketches and ‘Could we?’’s, and his studios draw the plans for the new hotels and build the black box models for the new shows. He has also surrounded himself with stories – with the stories his buildings tell, the stories his clients hear, and the stories anyone who experiences his architecture invent. And those are what keep him going, and what keep the work interesting. Standing in the JetBlue terminal, he points out that all we ever really care about when we’re about to fly is making sure we get something to eat. It’s true, for better or worse. And it’s just another place to start that story.
