David Rockwell Keynote Address at NeoCon 2016

There are few people that would motivate me to get up at the crack of dawn to hear before a full day of NeoCon showroom visits, but one of them is certainly David Rockwell. His Tuesday morning keynote talk in the Sauganash Ballroom next door the Merchandise Mart set a prevailing positive tone over what was to follow for the rest of the day.

Fresh from winning the Tony Award for set design for “She Loves Me,” a story set in a Budapest perfume shop, Mr. Rockwell proudly showed the audience his winning envelope from the night before. This was his fifth Tony nomination for set design, but his first win.

In many ways, Mr. Rockwell’s talk was a perfect synthesis of the many design convergences that happened at this NeoCon: themes of formal bridging into informal, or playing between displaying and concealing, or how an interior space can change its program throughout the day; many of these complex design challenges have been intrinsic to Rockwell Group’s practice since it was founded in 1984. His recently published book, “What if?”, delves into the firm’s creative process by way of its projects.

“‘What if?’ is a question that lays at the heart of our studio,” said Mr. Rockwell in his opening remarks. “It sums up the fact that our main question with the client is, ‘how do we understand what they are doing, and how do we present it in a fresh and interesting way?’”

Taking the audience on a reflective journey through the book with images and anecdotes, Mr. Rockwell remarked, “The book explores our sense of play and our curiosity; I want to emphasize curiosity, because in many ways that is the central element when somebody joins Rockwell Group. We want designers who don’t know the answer before they begin. We want that answer to emerge out of pushing, prodding and deep intersection.”

The book covers six main ideas: materiality, mashup, storytelling, stagecraft, choreography and transformation.

“It is our belief that, as things are machine-made around the world, and you can get the same thing anywhere now, handmade and handcrafted objects have even more impact,” said Mr. Rockwell..“Revealing the hand of the artist creates a kind of authenticity.”

Showing images of the Shinola retail store in New York, Mr. Rockwell began to speak about materiality.

“Shinola is a manufacturer of watches, leather goods, bicycles and much more,” he said. “When we met them at their headquarters, we noticed something about how they built their products and how they celebrated materials that gave us a sense of how to create a store for them.”

Letting the project images do most of the talking, Mr. Rockwell commented, “What you end up with is a place that is a great vessel for their products – one that does not compete with anything; sometimes the design becomes background, and sometimes it becomes foreground. The result was an environment that is part gallery, part store and part coffee shop, with everything playing off their love of American craftsmanship.”

 

Materiality is at the heart of Rockwell Group’s relationship with Nobu, the Japanese sushi empire with locations around the world.

“We have been working with them for 22 years,” he noted. Showing an image with chandeliers made of abalone, Mr. Rockwell remarked, “These were actually made in our model shop because we couldn’t find anyone to make them for us the way we wanted. The use of craftsmanship here, the materiality, is the key driver in the story.”

The bar area of Nobu 57 Street took two years for Rockwell Group to develop.

“It contains terrazzo with bamboo embedded in it. Bamboo and terrazzo are not natural friends; one is very soft, and the other is very hard. This material symbolized the heart of how we believe Nobu approaches food: simplicity of form and the idea of wrapping or containing an object.

All of that investigation into materiality comes at a price.

“15 years after the original Nobu, we were blessed to do Nobu 57 Street. The first Nobu cost $600,000 twenty-two years ago; Nobu 57 cost $12 million.” Times change.

Mashup is another topic explored in-depth in Mr. Rockwell’s book “What if?” “Mashup is how we live our lives,” he said. “How we work and eat and play are all combined to some extent.”

Mr. Rockwell showed images of the New York location of NeueHouse, a creative coworking space, and it was clear this was a concentrated project with many moving parts.

“This center barge has steps, inspired by the Spanish steps in Rome,” he explained. “During the day, people work in and around the steps, and in the evening the same space has lectures. During the day, food is located in the café; at night, the food carts come out and circulate. There was no separation of different places to work; you could work at a small desk, or you could work at a cubicle, and all this was movable and changeable.

“All of this was part of our thinking when we began to work with Knoll,” he noted, referring to the Rockwell Unscripted for Knoll collection by Knoll that was introduced at NeoCon this year.

Presenting a mashup between destination and journey, Mr. Rockwell then showed his most recent project, the restaurant Vandal in lower Manhattan.

“It is a mashup of street art, and it really draws a very interesting line between gritty and lush,” he said. “We commissioned Hush, an international and very well known street artist. He gathered seven other street artists, and we built the restaurant around their installations. The street artists built their installations as we were building the restaurant around them.

“Storytelling is very near and dear to my heart, and in fact, one of the main pivot points between architecture and theater. You know how clients always tend to pick the wrong thing to cut out of the budget? They couldn’t quite understand why we wanted a video map overlaying a large Asian statue for the restaurant Tao in Lower Manhattan. We did a mockup of it; in the scheme of this project, it was a $250,000 expense for a $13 million restaurant. We eventually convinced them to do it, and it is hypnotic. Every six months, we can get new video content for the sculpture.”

“Virgin Hotel, in terms of storytelling, was a super exciting opportunity for us,” said Mr. Rockwell. “This was their first hotel, and they wanted to suggest the Virgin zeitgeist without making it into a vocabulary.”

Picking up on touchstone visual themes like eccentric, British, and the fact that it was in a beautiful landmarked building in Chicago, the Virgin story began to unfold.

“The public spaces are grouped around what we call the Commons Club, which has an updated British club feel. What is used here for a café during the day becomes a wine bar at night. Each guest room has a dressing room, which is something Virgin was very interested in.”

Mr. Rockwell began to ask critical questions: How do you design something that feels like a special amenity? Given that every hotel has special amenities, how do you differentiate that?

“A disproportionate amount of space was given to the dressing room, which is obviously skewed towards women, who are decision-makers. By creating this dressing room, which really celebrates that function, it leads you to the chambers; the lounge bed has a traditional headboard with a sub-headboard where you could actually have a meeting on your bed.”

Storytelling goes hand in hand with branding across this hotel experience. One of the things Rockwell Group is best known for is stagecraft. “It was the first thing that interested me as a kid growing up, but it didn’t manifest itself until much later in my career,” he said. “It came about due to a friend of mine who gave me courage to do this. I was watching a Broadway show and critiquing the set, and my friend, a well-known lighting designer, said, ‘if you’re so smart, why aren’t you doing it yourself?’”

Already 20 years into a career of interior design, Mr. Rockwell began to meet with directors and understand what they wanted in a set. “It took me two or three months to understand that what they wanted was what I was interested in: physical places that tell stories.”

Mr. Rockwell presented images from “Kinky Boots,” a Cinderella story about a shoemaker in England who becomes tired of making the same shoes; coincidentally he meets a six-foot-two drag queen in London who can’t find proper boots. “They both have tense issues about what they want to do with their lives, and in what can only happen in musicals, they solve each other’s problems.”

Following guidance from Director Jerry Mitchell, who wanted every part of the set to reinforce the notion of making shoes, Mr. Rockwell noted, “We spent about nine months doing research and development on the treadmills for the set. The treadmills are first used for the delivery of boots to the stage, then they are used for the delivery of the cast. The treadmills actually become a huge part of the storytelling.” The cast falls in love with their environment.

“This is true in architecture,” he said. “Nothing makes a restaurant look better than the people who work there, loving their place. They sell the environment in a way that is very compelling, and that is certainly true in the theater as well.” Taking choreography out of the theater and introducing it to mass transit was Mr. Rockwell’s contribution to the JetBlue Terminal at JFK Airport.

“We believe that, in many cases, starting with movement is more important than starting with the building. When I first moved to Mexico as a child, I was less interested in any one building than the movement of experiences that connected all the buildings together.”

Rockwell Group began the project with research on what made good public spaces so effective, and eventually concluded that movement is intuitive. “We said to the CEO of JetBlue, ‘Why don’t we bring in a Broadway choreographer to consult, and why don’t we start with the movement?’”

Located right next door to the TWA Flight Center designed by Eero Saarinen, a building Mr. Rockwell called “a temple to movement,” Rockwell Group discovered that groups of people move largely in elliptical patterns.

“That led us to creating two bleachers for the space, positioned so that when you are entering the city, after you have left your gate, you move into the middle and accelerate into the speed of the city. When you are getting to the airport, you are directed towards these pieces, and you move to the outside of the bleachers that direct you to your gate.”

Transformation, the final theme in Mr. Rockwell’s book “What If?” is the most personal. “I had two kids that were growing up, and we were studying playgrounds, and I felt that, in the world of playgrounds, there was an interesting open space around child directed play. As we got into our research, we discovered a vast history of adventure playgrounds in and around Europe after World War II. We embarked on a five-year pro bono partnership with the city of New York and developed Imagination Playgrounds, which has many different blocks that allow kids to do what they do best, which is create their own way to play. As an architect, it is humbling to know that whatever it is you want to do, kids want to do something else. If you give them a toy, they want to take it apart and turn it upside down. That really became the guide for this.”

The Imagination Playground now exists around the world in 5000 locations.

“It is a multiple set of blocks and is the most life-giving project we have had a chance to do/”

Mr. Rockwell closed his inspirational NeoCon talk with a discussion of his most recent project, the furniture series called Rockwell Unscripted for Knoll.

“When Knoll approached us, I was thrilled and honored and terrified. A little bit of terror is a good thing when you are approaching a design project. This collection combines three ideas that are most present in our work: hospitality, theater and play. We thought that would be the glue that holds people together.

“We worked with Benjamin Pardo and an amazing team at Knoll. They are astonishing, in that much like a good client or director, they do everything but tell you what they want the finished piece to look like. They gave us vast amounts of research. They also did something that I think is interesting for a client: they did not want us drawing for a while. We spent six months researching, and the next few months we started to sketch.”

Aware that where one works, where one plays, and where one eats are all convergent, Mr. Rockwell and his team took the idea of hospitality and synthesized it down to another component – serendipity.

“There’s certainly a lot of design work around social, collaborative spaces and individual spaces,” he noted. “We thought about everything in between open plan and collaborative workspaces.”

Using the time-honored theme of the watercooler as an example, Mr. Rockwell noted, “A lot of the products and a lot of the pieces we created allow people to perch. It is an interesting thing to think about if you want to create something. How do you start it? What are the clues to begin a conversation? How do you move things around?

“The second subject that we looked at for the product is around portability. We found that portability is becoming more and more important as we delved into the research with Knoll. Portability could mean that the actual portability piece becomes a definer for the room.”

The last anchor for this collection is flexibility.

“That takes portability even one step further and in some ways sort of nails the idea that we think of Unscripted as an un-system as opposed to a system. We began to put these ideas together, and it grew into an ecosystem that in some ways is much like the playground blocks. We discovered that what we thought kids were doing with them was entirely different than we thought. In the testing period of the product, there were all kinds of interesting evolutions that were driven by the user, which was our fantasy when we began.”

The NeoCon audience at the Sauganash Ballroom in Chicago

Mr. Rockwell’s compelling and inspiring discussion was the perfect way to jump-start the second day at NeoCon this year. It had a bit of everything: humor, insight and motivation to make a difference in design. I’m looking forward to hearing more form Mr. Rockwell very soon.