David Rockwell Has a Lot of Nerve

On a Tuesday morning in late summer, Rockwell huddles with his team of three lighting specialists to go over plans for Buddha Bar, a downtown restaurant set to open next month. In architectural lingo, this is a "crit": a meeting to critique the designers' progress. Rockwell is not entirely pleased. He doesn't like the facade: The color is wrong, and he's worried about a streetlight's glare seeping into the three windows that front the building. And about those windows: "What do they do for us?" he snaps. "Why are they there?" Not holding back, he follows up with a series of rapid-fire technical questions about the interior lighting. He likes some of the answers he hears, but he is concerned. The exterior is still a problem, he says. It needs another meeting.

Later, I ask Rockwell if he has ever visited one of his completed projects and hated something about it. He rolls his eyes and mutters, "All the time." He knows that he came off as a tad overbearing in the Buddha Bar meeting, but he is unapologetic. "The approach to the exterior of the building was a bit lazy, and it was important to let the team know that," he says. "It helps everyone if you really say what's on your mind, as opposed to trying to couch it through a series of niceties. I believe that ultimately, people want to make a difference. But they can't make a difference if they don't have real interactions."

Rockwell is disinclined -- and far too busy -- to micromanage. Still, he sweats the details. Much of that impulse is biographical. His father died when he was 2, and he lost his mother when he was 15. "You learn that the big things are uncontrollable," he muses. "So you end up obsessing over all the little things, which is what we do here."

What's Most Lasting Is Also Most Fleeting
The youngest in a family of five boys, Rockwell's early life was marked by transition and dislocation. He was born in Chicago, but as a kid, he lived in a small town on the Jersey shore, where his mother -- an ex - tap dancer who toured with Abbott and Costello -- directed community theater groups, recruiting Rockwell and his brothers to act in minor roles. The early experience of sitting in a darkened room, watching a new world come magically to life on stage, triggered one of his core insights: "The things that have the most-lasting effect are also the most fleeting." So it goes with design, which need not always aspire to the grandiose and the permanent. Like theater itself, design can also be ephemeral and experiential. A restaurant, a hotel lobby -- even a workplace -- can become a stage set that transforms everyday experience, if only for a few moments. That realization set Rockwell free from the dead-end ambition of aiming for architectural posterity. "If permanence is your goal," Rockwell says now, "it rules out everything that isn't permanent."

When Rockwell was 10, his stepfather announced to the family that he was retiring from work and moving all of them to Guadalajara, Mexico. One week later, the youngster was jolted into a new world of mountains, crowded markets, bullrings, and spectacle. Rockwell would later express those elements through his passion for the physical representations of abrupt transition: entrances into buildings, where people pass from the hurly-burly of the street into a fictional world of Rockwell's making; and stairways, where customers take on the role of performers, leaving one stage set to enter another.

And then there was the light in Mexico. Rockwell fell in love with light. Years later, while working on his first project as an independent architect -- a New York restaurant called Sushi Zen -- he commissioned an artist to make a silk mural that covered an entire wall. He then puckered neon light through the mural, creating an iridescent glow. A month before the opening, the owners told him that they couldn't afford the neon. Rockwell wouldn't back down. Lighting governs the mood of a place, its buzz -- and buzz is sacred. He anted up $5,000 and paid for the lighting himself. The design was a smash. It launched his career.

When he was 18, Rockwell left Mexico to study architecture at Syracuse University. He jokes that he got off to a "horrifying" start. "My first assignment was to draw something in nature. I went outside and spent an hour doing this still life of my sandals. When I was done, I looked over and saw that one of my classmates had done the most amazing drawing of the entire campus. The next day, I went to my professor and told him that I had made a terrible career choice. 'You'll be fine,' he said. 'Just remember: You have less to unlearn than they do.' "

After many false starts and setbacks, Rockwell gradually got braver about slipping his own ideas into his assignments. In his second year, the major project was to design a town house. Along with his sketches and scale model, he invented a narrative history of the structure and wrote biographies of the people who lived there. It felt like a breakthrough: He had combined the formal with the experiential. He had put people front and center in his design.