Friday is Dog Day at the Rockwell Group office, so up on the eighth floor, overlooking New York’s Union Square, various species of canine are wandering around underneath their owners’ desks or dozing next to thick stacks of presentation boards. This real-life menagerie finds a curious echo in a rendering of the proposed extension to Caesar’s Palace casino in Las Vegas, one of the many current projects on display in the architecture firm’s teeming loft. The Vegas Mirage may have its volcano erupting at regular intervals, but Rockwell’s Circus Maximus will go one better, with a full-scale indoor Roman hill town and an outdoor Noah’s Ark of exotic animals parading several times daily on the Strip. After all, why use technology to imitate nature when you can have nature itself, albeit tamed and domesticated?
“It’s all so hyper, steroidal, and blown up out there in Las Vegas,” comments David Rockwell, the forty-year-old ringmaster of the Rockwell Group. So he and his team have decided to buck the trend toward more and more flashy special effects and go for “an idea so outrageously counter to technology that I think it could work”: the old-fashioned thrill of wild beasts. He assures me that the project is overseen by consultant zoologists, and that the lower portion of the hill town will provide pens for the animals between sets.
Still, there’s something quietly disturbing about the image itself: a colored drawing that looks more like something out of a nineteenth-century children’s bedtime fable than a perspective for a casino in the late 1990s—lighthearted about using exotic animals to turn a gambling reserve into a modified game reserve, blithely innocent about the multibillion-dollar entertainment industry. Because this industry is the economic engine that has really driven the Rockwell Group’s growth, from 40 people three years ago to 110-strong today. Its expansion is a measure of the massive demand for new leisure venues in the US and worldwide, a trend noted during I.D. Magazine’s Entertainment Design Roundtable (March–April 1996), in which Rockwell participated.
Populated predominantly by upbeat thirtysomethings and their dogs, the atmosphere at the office is that of a frenetic fun factory, an assembly plant for the combine harvesters of the late twentieth-century leisure landscape: restaurants, casinos, circuses, theme parks, theme restaurants (including Planet Hollywoods in thirty cities), movie theaters, and cruise ships, for clients including Caesar’s, Disney, Sun International, Marvel, Sony Theatres, and CBS.
“I always loved the circus. I thought owning a bunch of tigers would be great,” says Rockwell, patting an employee’s pet while explaining the multitude of giant projects currently on the firm’s drawing boards. Customarily attired in jeans and sneakers (though he sports just socks in the office), Rockwell is possessed of a charm and boyish demeanor just this side of rock stardom. It’s easy to see why he has become one of the most sought-after exponents of “entertainment design”—that hybrid of narrative-driven interior design, lighting, and special effects, practiced on the same scale by only a few other American firms, such as the Jerde Partnership, Thompson & Wood, and Walt Disney Imagineering.
“The whole movement in our industry is no longer to create malls with department stores, but to do something much more theatrical,” says Sheldon Gordon, client for Circus Maximus and for the conversion of London’s Battersea Power Station. “That’s where the mystique of the Rockwell Group lies.”
Born in Chicago, the youngest of five boys, David Rockwell moved with his family at age ten to Guadalajara, Mexico, where he attended high school and seriously considered a career as a concert pianist. From south of the border, Rockwell remembers, American popular entertainment—TV shows like I Love Lucy—came to have almost mythic appeal. Another period abroad may also have served to cement this enthusiasm: while studying architecture at Syracuse, he spent a semester at London’s Architectural Association, where he was exposed to the lingering influence of the 1960s Archigram group, whose heady visions of architecture and technology (such as Plug-in City) were peculiarly British interpretations of American pop iconography.
But Rockwell freely admits “architecture was certainly not my first love.” That passion was reserved for the theater, which still evokes strong emotions for Rockwell, especially given its family associations. As a boy, he took part in amateur dramatics organized by his mother, a former vaudeville dancer who died when he was fifteen; one of his closest brothers, who died of AIDS just a couple of years ago, also worked in theater. While in college, he worked as a summer assistant to the Broadway lighting designer Roger Morgan, and his conversation is peppered with references to specific theatrical productions and their set designers, from Bob Crowley to Ralph Koltai to Boris Aronson.
“Theater, when it works, has the ability to create a lasting memory,” he explains. “It’s a participatory experience, something that’s being done in real time, much more of a living, breathing experience. It’s hotter, more involving. What’s so fun is looking at the audience.”
The Rockwell portfolio runs the gamut from the pumped-up high tech of the Planet Hollywood at Florida’s Walt Disney World to the repro Art Deco of the forthcoming Sony multiplex in Detroit to the neo-neoclassicism of Circus Maximus. This liberal borrowing from history, and the firm’s chameleon tendency to render each project in a different graphic style, lead one to wonder what exactly constitutes the Rockwell Group’s own architectural signature. “It’s very safe to go into a design process knowing what the result is going to be, based on a preconceived style,” Rockwell says, arguing that, by contrast, his firm takes a more collaborative approach than most architects. “We are very experientially driven. We try to find out what’s unique about each project, and draw that out with the client.”
Gradually one realizes that this flamboyant eclecticism is the house style, albeit underpinned by a consistent emphasis on lighting and materials, as well as a penchant for figurative puns, like the giant popcorn-container concession stand at the Sony Loews Eighty-Fourth Street cinema, or the barstools in the form of cocktail olives at the Monkey Bar restaurant, both in Manhattan. The more populist a place is meant to be, the greater the density of eye-catching material on display, as if there were some direct relationship between profusion of detail and richness of narrative content. Or to put it another way: the shorter the time scheduled for customers to have a good time (as in theme restaurants like Planet Hollywood and the Official All Star Sports Cafe, where turnover of tables is tightly choreographed), the higher the necessary dosage of visual stimuli.
At the first All Star Cafe, which opened in February in New York’s Times Square, the cornice line is taken up with a ring of giant TV monitors, offering a Las Vegas–style sports book blitz to compete with one’s burger and fries. A new hybrid experience is in the making here: a kind of public TV dinner. “In All Star, the mission was to try and create a stadium-type experience, through video,” says Rockwell, though in a real stadium the crowd is usually focused on a single point of action, whereas here, the diners’ attention is centrifugally dispersed along multiple sightlines. “It works best when all of those screens are used together,” Rockwell concedes, explaining that his team doesn’t have a lot of control over what gets broadcast. “We try to have input on the content, on what’s actually happening there. If not, the system is designed to do one thing, and it ends up doing another.” As architecture becomes more intertwined with moving-image media, their programming becomes integral to the overall spatial effect.
At the June press conference unveiling the Mohegan Sun casino, scheduled to open in October in Connecticut, I listen as the Wolf People’s cultural attaché explains the project’s allusions to tribal customs and rituals. Developed by Sol Kerzner’s Sun International in partnership with the Mohegan Indians, this new out-of-stately pleasure dome is being built on the reused foundations of the former United Nuclear Corporation, and is clearly intended to rival Foxwoods Resort Casino ten miles east. Rockwell explains that “the language of the Mohegan tribe is practically gone,” and that “to take its two or three basic building types, all very small, and blow them up to mammoth proportions was an obvious no-no.” Adopting a strategy that historians have termed the Invention of Tradition, his team developed “a mythic landscape that is not a literal re-creation of anything that existed before,” and “an ‘order’ of architecture that relates to this tribe, incorporating the two key Mohegan symbols, the Path of Life and the Medallion.” Each quadrant of its circular plan is associated with a season, a theme that extends from the canopied entrances at the cardinal points to those places where the demands of food-court nationalism require a sudden shift in decor from Mohegan to some other culture.
While Rockwell is eloquently outlining the scheme, my attention strays to the presentation boards arrayed all around the assembled press. Color interior perspectives, mostly by night, their palette and rendering style are reminiscent of storyboards by movie art directors, concept sketches that convey the look of a film, its atmosphere and emotional cadences. It crosses my mind that the Rockwell Group designs not so much real places as scenarios. These images are meant to conjure an impression of a place that does not yet exist, and moreover, never will: the environment that you enter, when construction is completed, is only the 3D realization of a fictional elsewhere. The original existed only as a fantasy in a comic book or movie or TV program. Entering a Rockwell Group project is tantamount to entering the film itself, the story come to life. How this tallies with real life, and what impact that has on our perception thereof, remains to be determined.
At the end of the nineteenth century, a whole spate of utopian novels appeared—including Edward Bellamy’s famous Looking Backward of 1888—that offered detailed accounts of fantastic future cities. Such technological visions fed the imaginations of civic architects and world’s fair dreamers; theme park attractions are the everyday successors to those spectacular expositions, theme restaurants their downtown spores.
The Rockwell Group is continuing in this time-honored tradition: designing fantasy environments that satisfy a fin de siècle appetite for escape. But by now, the technologies (like elevators and telephones) that were so radical a century ago have become standard infrastructure. So the firm’s projects speak not to the excitement of a future yet to be realized, but of a past that seems in collective memory to have been more magical. If a dream represents a wish, then these entertainment complexes represent the desire to return to simple childhood wonderment at the marvels of Science and Technology, to a culture in touch with nature and the turning seasons, rather than distanced from it by communication technology and media-based spectacles such as sporting tournaments.
Talking with Rockwell and his senior associates—all equally effervescent in their enthusiasm for their work—one sometimes marvels at how they can be so relentlessly upbeat, so unvexed by the implications of creating environments for high-octane spec-tatorship and consumption. Not for them the agonized inquiries of “culture industry” critics or academic theorists. One must look elsewhere for discussion of the ethics of gambling as a tool of economic regeneration, or the curious trade-off between authenticity and artifice whereby a Native American tribe willingly permits its symbolism to be recast as the ersatz architectural vernacular of a giant casino. The politics of mass leisure are not easily broached with those daily immersed in its manufacture.
In an attempt to root out some—any—intimations of inner disquiet, I send Rockwell a recent interview with Benjamin Barber, author of the 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld, in which he argues that global media and service corporations are reducing diverse communities to one homogeneous world culture. Referring to what he calls “Disney colonization,” Barber likens the almost imperceptibly gradual process of cultural domination to “a very shallow but extensive flood tide that seeps into everything. It doesn’t seem deep or disastrous at the time, but then we find that mud is...everywhere.”
When we meet for lunch at Nobu, the Japanese restaurant in Tribeca that is one of Rockwell’s most celebrated designs, he has carefully read and highlighted the article, but rejects most of its key contentions. “I disagree with the implication in the essay you sent that technology is flattening and homogenizing time and culture,” he tells me. “So does travel, and so does old age. You could pick out the same things Barber says are terrible, and find the wonderful, magical things about them. To say Disney is bad as a thing is so simplistic. I’d say Disney’s done some wonderful stuff and some that’s not so wonderful. And if you don’t want to watch Disney, don’t turn them on.”
He turns and asks me a question: “You find Disney interferes with the way you proceed with your life?”
I suggest that what Barber is referring to is much more systemic, having to do with ownership and control of technology. “I understand the point, though I think it’s overstated,” Rockwell says. “I just have a much more optimistic view of technology. The combination of craftsmanship and technology is very exciting.”
While he’s talking, Rockwell’s positive outlook succeeds in making one suspend one’s deep-seated qualms about the kinds of places his firm produces, their saccharine appeal to a common denominator culture.
“I think playfulness and a sense of humor are survival skills,” he says. “It’s no mystery that people want to be in places that encourage that. I certainly believe that optimism, humor, magic, and wit are the flip opposites of tragedy.” Asked if he could conceive of doing something as sober as the Holocaust Museum, he replies, “It would be a real challenge, but sure.” (Actually, what he’d really like to do next is a Caribbean resort or an airport.)
“My own experiences are sort of wonderful and horrible all at the same time,” he reflects. “I think optimism is just the smarter choice.”