DAVID ROCKWELL: ̒I’ve started to think
much more about the shape and the texture
Rockwell Group has taken over the last 35
years since the 2014 publication of our last
book, What If. That process gave me a chance
to look in the rear-view mirror and start to
identify the things that drive our interest.
When you’re in the middle of it all, you’re just
surviving, but when you pull back the camera
things always look neater.’̒For one, it let me consider what started my
interest in design early on. I was born in
Chicago, the youngest of a large family of five
boys. We moved to the Jersey Shore when
I was four. My mother had been a dancer in
Vaudeville, but she had long since stopped
dancing by the time I came along. A few years
after we’d settled in New Jersey she helped
to start a community theatre called The Deal
Players. It allowed me to see my family in a
different light, with my mum in the lead crea-
tive role. My brothers and I all pitched in too.
You were either in the production yourself
or you built sets or were a stagehand. That
experience married with my natural instinct
to make things. At home I had a garage with a
second floor that had nothing in it other than
objects I would scavenge from around town,
such as rollers for doors, buckets and balls. It
was really like a Rube Goldberg installation
that I constantly changed and reconfigured
for various holidays. I particularly remember
the haunted house I created for Halloween.
Through this playful experimentation and by
opening up the haunted house to the other
kids in the neighbourhood, I discovered
building as a way to bring people together. ’
̒We came to New York for the first time when
I was 11 for a day in the city. There were sev-
eral things that I really fell in love with that
have driven a lot of my work. We walked all
over midtown and through Hell’s Kitchen
and Times Square. I couldn't believe that
every window on every floor of every build-
ing was another life, another family. There
was something I found so surreal about the
stacked nature of how people live and work,
and that the streets became their living rooms
as a result of the density. I went to my first
Broadway show, Fiddler on the Roof – later I
became a student and a real fan of the man
who designed it, Boris Aronson. I now collect
some of his work. And I went to Schrafft's for
lunch, which was the first restaurant chain
designed for female customers. If you look
at Paul Freedman’s book, Ten Restaurants
That Changed America, Schrafft’s is in there.
It was the first time I had visited a restaurant
where eating wasn’t a competitive sports. It
was elevated. Those formative experiences of
the city as a public place, of the theatre and of
dining have stayed with me.’̒A career in architecture wasn’t something
that was preordained from an early age, how-
ever. I actually played piano seriously in my
teens. I was better than my friends, but when
I gave recitals I knew I just didn’t have it. And
so I went to architecture school, but it wasn’t
strategic. By that time we had moved to
Mexico and I knew I wanted to come back to
New York. I knew I wanted to be near theatre
and I knew I liked making things... that I was
a good problem solver.’̒I went to Syracuse University, where the
programme had a sort of Bauhaus ethos. I’ll
admit that I was unprepared. It was clear
from day one that there were many kids for
whom this was a career choice they had been
considering for many years. I, on the other
hand, just showed up thinking ‘this sounds
good to me’. Siegfried Snyder, one of our
first-year professors, gave us a project to go
out and draw something in nature. I had my
Mexican sandals on. I put one sandal under a
tree and started drawing. Then I glanced over
at one of my classmates, Jeff Hill, and saw he
had drawn the entire campus in a sort of MC
Escher style. I looked back at my sketch and
thought, ‘fuck, that’s not good’. That night
Buckminster Fuller came to speak at Hen-
dricks Chapel. I don’t know how many people
would confess that they didn’t understand
what he was saying, but I had no problem
admitting it. I went to Snyder a day later,
kind of in tears, saying “this may be a career
mistake because I’m not sure I have all the
knowledge”. He replied, “it may be that you
have less to unlearn than some other people”.’DAVID
̒I soon realized the truth of that. One of my
earliest student design projects was creating
two townhouse residences. It was supposed
to be very much about formal arrangement,
but I started out by writing the narrative of
who lived there and why. I remember the
teacher telling me: “That’s not useful. What
you really need to do is think about the space
between the walls and the floor on the figure
ground.” I said, “for me it’s useful”. And that
kind of narrative thinking has remained use-
ful ever since.’̒The evolution of Rockwell Group has been
similarly unplanned. I wish I could say it was
more strategic. I never had the ambition to
have anywhere near as big a studio as we have
now – it’s become the sum of all the things
that I want to do. If there was one moment
of strategy that I can remember, it was in ’96.
We were doing a lot of restaurant projects,
such as Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Vong,
Monkey Bar, and Nobu. I knew I wanted to
do more. And so I made a diagram of the
things that I was interested in: hospital-
ity, performance, storytelling, materiality,
craftsmanship and so forth. Then I thought
about all the project types that could intersect
with these interest, from theatres to librar-
ies. In particular, I decided that an airport
would be an interesting typology for us to
tackle. It took us until the turn of the century
to complete one: Jet Blue’s Terminal Five at
JFK. More recently we’ve completed over 35
restaurants at United Airline’s Terminal C at
Newark Airport. It was certainly important to
step away, think about what else we could be
doing, and then work towards that goal.’̒Running a practice generates a lot of anxi-
ety, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad
thing. For me, anxiety has always been a
strong motivator to do things, rather than
a reason not to. I think a certain amount of
uncertainty is important. It drives the creative
process. And if I look back at my career, those
moments of uncertainty have often resulted
in important successes for the business. Our
first theatre project, the Dolby Theatre in
New York City, was terrifying. Same with our
first hotel, the W Hotel, also in New York
(the first W ever). Now it’s the same with the
offices for Warner Music that we’ve just »48 PORTRAITS