David Rockwell Has a Lot of Nerve

"This Is About Fixing Problems As They Crop Up"
"Can we adjust the panties to make them look more pantylike?" says Rockwell to no one in particular as he paces the stage of the Neil Simon Theatre. It's three weeks from Hairspray's opening night, and Rockwell is futzing with the first of his 18 sets, a teenage girl's bedroom, ingeniously tilted at a 90-degree angle so that it gives the audience a bird's-eye view. For weeks now, Rockwell has spent most of his waking hours at the theater. One can imagine angry developers calling from Berlin and Jakarta, wondering why out-of-kilter panties, a 25-foot can of hairspray, and a stage curtain made to resemble a teenybopper's hairdo are taking precedence over their billion-dollar projects.

To create the Hairspray sets, Rockwell and his design team began where they always do: at the beginning. The musical is based on the John Waters film of the same name, a weird, slightly subversive effort that became a kind of camp classic. The story takes place in a Technicolor dreamland version of working-class Baltimore circa 1962. Waters celebrates the ordinariness of that city in an incredibly baroque way, and Rockwell and his team spent weeks researching the look of the place: the two-story row houses made of lime-green Formstone, a faux, rocklike material, with their screen doors and their flowerpots and their three-step marble stoops, scrubbed to an ultrawhite sheen. In Waters's world, everything is a little wonky and off center. Rockwell found that in order to make the row houses look fake, he first had to make them look real. He had artists paint each block of Formstone in each row house in a photorealistic style, but then he canted the houses so that the buildings lean at odd angles, to reflect Waters's flattened, on-screen perspective.

"Every design decision aims to get the audience to buy in emotionally to this teenage girl's view of the world, which is very optimistic," says Rockwell. "It's an incredibly complex undertaking."

Rockwell looks exhausted, but he's jazzed. The stage is once again proving to be an addictive place, a laboratory where he can experiment in real-time collaboration with the art producer, the director, the technical gurus, and the costume designers who are also living 24-7 on the Hairspray set. "This isn't auteurism," he declares, gesturing to the crew of coconspirators working alongside him. "This is about fixing problems as they crop up, and it's a model that we're going to use on future projects." He's already thinking about bringing in a team of scenery makers, lighting wizards, and choreographers (choreographers!) for that airport he's competing for -- and why not? Nearly 40 years ago, in one of those darkened community playhouses on the Jersey shore, the theater imparted its most valuable lesson: If you can find a way to yoke the collective talents of smart, experienced people, anything is possible.

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Designing a Narrative
David Rockwell's designs encourage people to make contact with built spaces -- to run their hands along the scorched ash of the tabletops and feel the ridges of raised grain that mimic the texture of the food at Nobu, to brush up against the thatches of wheatgrass sprouting out of the planters at W Union Square's reception desk. Rockwell even makes people want to connect with elements that are beyond their reach, such as the 30 million crystal beads suspended from the ceiling of Connecticut casino Mohegan Sun.

The core of connection is narrative -- the story line that brings a space to life. For the casino, Rockwell's team studied a history of Connecticut's Mohegan Indian tribe. They divided the 600,000 square feet of the project's first phase into quadrants, each section related to a season, which were all connected by a "life trail." For the second phase, the designers discovered that the tribe was originally drawn to a white rock in Connecticut, which they called Wombi Rock. So Rockwell's crew sculpted a translucent mountain out of onyx and lit it from within, creating a luminous, cathedral-sized diamond right there in the center of the space.

Rockwell doesn't expect visitors to decode Mohegan legend. But he wants to use the tribe's history to give the place an underlying intelligence, something not associated with casinos -- or, for that matter, with what passes for contemporary design.

Bill Breen (bbreen@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Learn more about David Rockwell and his firm on the Web (www.rockwellgroup.com).