David Rockwell on Stage Design, Sound Absorption and the Importance of Restaurant Bathrooms
David Rockwell has done it all. He’s designed iconic restaurants like Nobu and La Tête d'Or, innovated the dining at Grand Central Station and even set the stage for theatrical adaptations of Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hairspray.
On a recent episode of Milk Street Radio, the architect and founder of the award-winning Rockwell Groupjoined Christopher Kimball to talk creating some of New York’s most iconic spaces, the many ways to combat excessive sound and why a good designer never overlooks the bathrooms.
Listen to the full episode here, and read excerpts from the interview below.
On how to tell if a restaurant is well-run at a glance
From a design point of view, the first 10 or 15 seconds are critically important, and the same is true in a theater performance, where I think you get a sense of whether there's a distinct point of view that feels like it's about you, that feels like it's welcoming. So, there's things I look for, like, what's the quality of light? What kind of visibility [do] you have into the room? Is it a room that has multiple rooms that you're going to sequence through?
Having done so many restaurants, there's things I look for. Where are the great seats? If a designer really does his job well and we understand the concept and the food and the chef and the location, I think when you come in, you feel a sense of welcome authenticity. Your posture maybe lowers a little bit, even if it's a very buzzy, noisy place. In that case, you're leaning forward instead of leaning back. But I think it feels consistent and authentic.
Union Square Cafe (Photo credit: Emily Andrews)
On the process of designing the new Union Square Cafe
It starts like really any project we do that's [a] hospitality or theater or healthcare or university project. We always start with lots and lots of research. And in the case of Union Square, we had the living research there. I had been a guest for many years. My office moved there in ’94, so I was a frequent guest there. And Danny Meyer likes to tell the story, which may be true, that for many years, I kept going there for lunch, saying, “When are we going to work together?” I don't remember [it] quite like that, but it's possible that I was pushy about it because I loved what he did. And in some ways, as a designer, getting to work with a new restaurateur is getting to learn their language, and my whole studio is based on trying to create places where people really want to gather. And Danny seemed like a master of that, and that had been how I started out. I started out with an interest in public space and theater and restaurants, and then moved in that direction.
So there were a couple things we looked at. We took every piece of art that had been in Union Square Cafe over the years and made a small model of it, and made a model of the space. And then we proposed a few different ways to take that space and kind of infuse it with Union Square Cafe-ness. One of them was those light fixtures that hang above that are perforated, sort of patina metal hanging there. They're open metal with a light below. They're vaguely reminiscent of an industrial fixture you might see, but not quite like that. So, it is both familiar and surprising, which I guess became part of the mantra for Union Square Cafe, the new one. But those hang at the height of the ceiling in the old restaurant.
The bar on the left is the length of the original bar, and the original bar sits on the mezzanine. It's the one thing you can't see when you come in. There's a stair up, and then there's a mezzanine with a small second bar, which was a piece of the original bar. So we took all of the artwork over the years which had changed, and with a model, we sort of put it near different places.
So as you start to explore the restaurant, you get a sense of in the floor for instance, the flooring is a series of rectangles and squares that are related to the proportions of the room in the original Union Square Cafe. All the wood that sits above you is similar to the wood from the original Union Square Cafe, but in this case, it's with micro perforations with acoustical absorption above it. So we just went piece by piece, really meeting with Danny and his team every week, with a model in sort of microsurgery, not big gestures, but a series of smaller gestures that started to weave together how this new place would take on the continuing life of the original, but have something new as well.
The Original Nobu (Photo credit: Paul Warchol)
There’s a science to picking tables for dining spaces
It's very much something we think about, and you try as best you can to get the most complete understanding of who you're working with and what their point of view is. In some ways, I like to think of it as kind of extracting a script from a chef or a restaurateur. And then there's surprises along the way. The original Nobu with Drew [Nieporent] and Meir Teper and Nobu [Matsuhisa] and [Robert] De Niro on Hudson Street, the first one, that was a kind of a tsunami that I had no idea was going to have that big an impact as a food concept, as a restaurant.
But one of the things Nobu [Matsuhisa] talked about early on is he wanted no tablecloths, and so that the experience there for luxury dining is actually quite simple. The chairs are very simple. The tables are just scorched ash, which was a traditional Japanese technique that I thought would link to his philosophy of food and his use of texture. Compared to La Tête d'Or, which we just finished for Daniel Boulud, with big, plush Hollywood booths that are set for a casual dinner with a prime rib trolley coming along. It really is a fascinating thing to think about, all the different elements that are going into the restaurateur’s mind and trying to channel those into a place that feels like it's the right place to have that experience.
Don’t forget about the bathrooms!
The people who think bathrooms matter, I'm with that group. I think it's a great chance to really make a terrible second impression, if it doesn't work. And by nature, places are under-bathroomed. I guess that's a function of budget and square footage...I think bathrooms are a chance to have a little bit of an additional design feature that can either go really well or go badly.
On building the stage for Rocky Horror Picture Show
I had wanted to do theater since I was a kid. [I] studied architecture, also studied theater, but in about ‘95 I started sketching with directors and meeting with directors, and had many false starts, and then I was offered the Rocky Horror Show, which, having lived in Guadalajara from ‘68 to ’74, there was like a hole in my pop culture knowledge. I really didn't know much about it. So I went home and watched the movie and came back and met with the director and said, “Tell me what's so special about this.” Because seeing it on DVD, I didn't quite get it. And he said, “It's about an audience becoming part of the performance. It's about design and allowing [the] audience to become a part of the performance. And it was a life changing experience on every level. There were certain things I didn't know, which ended up being helpful, like you want to be able to ask, what if? and not accept standard solutions. And since the story goes from being in this B movie and then stepping into the B movie with Dr. Frank-N-Furter, we proposed that the floor of the theater would have seats on it with the cast members. And as a show began, they would leave, and the floor itself would flip and become this other location. It was a hypnotic experience to be there and see that audience get immersed. It really made me fall even more in love with theater and kind of understand the relationship between that and dining is these places that create a sense of community in this city.
The View at the Marriott Marquis (Photo credit: Jason Varney)
A restaurant architect’s guide to acoustics
Well, restaurateurs have wildly different opinions about that, and there's many factors. One is sound absorption. So, [it was] traditionally fabric walls, which La Tête d'Or has those upholstered walls. Or recently, we just finished The View for Danny Meyer, which was the old Marriott Marquis rotating restaurant. We have very plush carpeting, which is another way to absorb sound. And then there's a million different ways to do acoustical material on the ceiling, from cork to fabric-wrapped panels to something called Tectum. The things that will ramp up the level of sound in a restaurant is density of tables, how close the tables are together, and then something that we don't have much say on, although we certainly have an opinion, and that is how loud the music is. Because sometimes, if [the] restaurateur wants to create a really buzzy place, there'll be a lot of sound, and that loud sound makes people talk louder. But there's a number of strategies. Tablecloths help, although I guess the majority of the restaurants we're doing right now don't have tablecloths, but that's kind of a cyclical thing.
There are sounds you want. You want the clink of glasses. You want the sense of urban life, and you just try and do your best to balance those knowing you don't, as the designer, hold all the cards. You hold some of the cards, and you try and do the best you can to come up with the right solution.
Quotes have been edited for clarity.
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Sydney Manning
Sydney Manning is the Managing Digital Editor at Milk Street. She holds a BS in Marketing Communication from Emerson College, and an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University. For the past five years at Milk Street, Sydney has worked as a social media editor, blogger, podcaster, project manager and book marketer. In her free time she enjoys cooking with friends, reading and antiquing. She lives in South Carolina with her family.
