David Rockwell Has a Lot of Nerve

New York architect David Rockwell doesn't fit in.
Not in this place. Clad in a gray T-shirt, black jeans, and black-suede Merrells, with a paint-smudged tote bag slung over his shoulder, he punches at his cell phone while waiting impatiently for an elevator. The lobby in which he finds himself is standard-issue design for a 57th Street office building: all black marble and colossal columns, it is cold, austere, and massive -- the impersonal gateway to a building that has been designed for the ages and therefore relates to no age at all.

After an ear-popping ascent to the top floor, Rockwell is ushered into a conference room where a hotel developer accompanied by a coterie of executive types awaits him. Rockwell slouches into a chair and makes his pitch for a chain of boutique hotels targeted at a demographic that has been ignored by the industry. Direct and steady, he cracks an occasional joke. But beneath the tousled, low-key approach is a boiling drive. Affably but insistently, he makes a bid to establish some firm deadlines and fast-track the project. Apparently, he makes some headway, for as the session concludes, the lead executive leans back and without smiling declares that he's excited by the plan. Yet another David Rockwell project has taken another step forward.

This will be remembered as the year that corporate America lost its nerve. Vast empires crumbled under the weight of bad strategies and phony accounting. CEOs desperate for profits devoted themselves to cutting costs rather than to launching products. Innovation? Imagination? Who could afford them?

Through it all, David Rockwell has kept building. More important, the spaces that he designs have continued to embrace a nervy commitment to such out-of-favor ideas as playful energy, visual daring, and, most significant, human connection. Arguably more than any other architect, Rockwell has put people -- not the stick figures of architectural renderings but flesh-and-blood human beings -- at the center of his projects. He and his firm of 90 designers, model makers, artists, craftspeople, and sculptors seek to invent places that engage and entertain. Or, to be more precise, Rockwell Group creates spaces where talented people -- the all-star chefs of Nobu, Town, and 32 other restaurants; McCann-Erickson WorldGroup's copywriters; the performers of Cirque du Soleil and of the Academy Awards' new Kodak Theatre, in Hollywood; the cast of the Broadway smash Hairspray -- can collaborate and create. "We love it when clients don't talk about what they want the space to look like but instead focus on the things they're really passionate about," says Rockwell. "That's when we start to understand them."

Rockwell likes to say that every space contains a "secret narrative," and it's up to his design team to make the narrative real. So the team members spend weeks interviewing, researching, and exploring the world beyond architecture to find inspiration. Only then will the look of the place be revealed. Nobu's serpentine space came out of research into Kabuki theater. The swirling silver-leaf ovals that crown the ceiling of Kodak Theatre are a tribute to Busby Berkeley's dance sequences. The sculpted tigers prowling the facade of the Detroit Tigers' Comerica Park were inspired by the elephants at the Bronx Zoo. "You can't just look for interesting design devices," Rockwell says. "You have to discover the heart and soul of a project. Only then will you have a fighting chance of bringing the space to life."

"The Big Things Are Uncontrollable"
Walk into most architects' offices, and what you'll find is self-referential: framed elevations and photographs of the firm's "best of" projects. Enter Rockwell Group's loftlike space off of Union Square, which includes the former offices of the late Spy magazine, and you'll find the world. True, on Rockwell's desk stands a maquette from his staging of the Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show. But then there's also his collection of kaleidoscopes ("They reframe the world in unfamiliar ways"), a spinable globe, and a pillow stenciled with a kind of Rockwellian motto ("If life is a stage, I want better lighting"). Outside his office, on other designers' desks, are packets of Crayola crayons, minimodels of NASCAR racers, Buddha prints, Japanese transformer toys, and stacks of reference books. It all adds up to a workplace of "messy vitality," as Rockwell puts it, where the designers' inspirations are drawn from nature, history, pop culture, film, and craft.