PROFILE: DAVID ROCKWELL DAVID ROCKWELL Q+A
Which buildings give you goosebumps? Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona certainly does, as does walking up the stairs at Radio City Music Hall in Madison Square Gardens in New York. The first time I went up the escalators at the Centre Pompidou in Paris was a pretty extraordinary experience. I only heard one concert at Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, but that certainly gave me goosebumps.
I ’m fascinated by magic and I collect working drawings of how illusions are created
Which architects and designers do you admire? I’m obviously a fan of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro – we do a lot of work with them. I think Todd Williams and Billie Tsien do extraordinary work. I visited Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton building in Paris recently. Gehry is an easy person to pick, but the fact is the work is exceptional. I was recently in his studio and
his level of R&D is amazing. I respect the work of the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister and I’ve always loved the work of the Tokyo- based architects Atelier Bow-Wow. In terms of up and coming
talent, there’s a small design firm called Ibuku that I’m really interested in. They’re led by Elora Hardy, and they use bamboo to make fantastical creations.
Tell us something not many people know about you I love to play piano, I love to cook and I’m a fanatical Chicago Bears fan. I’m fascinated by magic and I collect working drawings of how illusions are created. I also have a 100 piece kaleidoscope collection.
What drives you? The desire to grab any opportunity I can to create something that brings a sense of delight.
Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa to work on Nobu’s first restaurant, Nobu New York. “We created a heavily narrative space, from the river stone walls to the cherry blossoms stencilled on the floor that refer to Madame Butterfly,” says Rockwell. “It was a richly lay- ered environment that was inspired by Nobu’s food.” It’s a relationship that has lasted more than 20 years, with Rockwell Group designing many of Nobu’s restaurants, as well as his first hotel in Las Vegas, and they are working together on further hotels. “It’s been a privi- lege working with Nobu – he wanted to be an architect and I wouldn’t mind being a chef, so in some ways we complete each other.” After making a name for himself in hos- pitality, Rockwell moved into set design. “I spent about four years meeting with direc- tors and sketching solutions for theatre, and building that muscle and dialogue with directors, before being asked to do the set design for the Rocky Horror Show,” he says. “It was the perfect first show and a mirac- ulous experience.” Since then his firm has
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designed sets for shows including Hairspray, Legally Blonde and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, for the Trey Parker and Matt Stone-directed film Team America: World Police and for the Annual Academy Awards in 2009 and 2010.
SEPTEMBER 11 2001 Pre-9/11, while Rockwell Group had worked on projects such as the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, the majority of their work was focused on spaces that brought people pleasure – they were even working on a book titled Pleasure at the time. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, however, Rockwell found himself struggling to find the same level of enthu- siasm in both himself and his team for the work they’d been doing.
“I was so deeply affected, personally and
professionally by the attacks – I lived in Tribeca, less than a mile away from the Twin Towers,” he says. “Our neighbourhood was totally devastated. It was very hard for me and the team to understand how creating
these places we created was relevant in light of this enormous disaster.” As Rockwell was thinking about what to do next, he was approached by a parent from a local school that had been destroyed by the attacks. The children were moving to a tem- porary school, and the parent asked Rockwell to help make the cafeteria more uplifting. “I went to look at the school and had a
very clear A-ha moment that here was a chance to use design as an affirmation of life,” says Rockwell. “That project was a really cathartic and eye-opening experience for myself, my studio and all the other artists we brought in to help.” As a result of this project, someone from
the city of New York approached Rockwell and asked whether he might be interested in building a temporary viewing platform for VIPs at Ground Zero.
Rockwell teamed up with fellow New York
architects Liz Diller, Rick Scofidio and Kevin Kennon, and decided they would take on the project, but only if they could create a public
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