Creating Spaces

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Architectural purists dismiss Rockwell's creations as stagecraft. There is a sense that the attention he's getting for Hairspray is appropriate because his work has always been set building, not creating a fully functioning environment. Even at the Mohegan Sun, for all its finery, the empty space and boring roof structure are quite visible beyond the panels of beads that form the ceiling. You can see through the illusion.

Rockwell doesn't disavow his affection for theater. His mother was a choreographer — some of his happiest memories are of community theater with his four older brothers in Deal, N.J. After studying architecture at Syracuse University and the Architectural Association in London, he worked for a lighting designer before pursuing architecture proper. "Theater is an interesting laboratory for what we're doing as architects," he says of his firm. "We love to do buildings that are permanent as much as the next person, but I think that permanence can be stifling. Creating something that is genuinely delightful and engaging and temporary is as valid a pursuit." If his interiors are merely sets, he insists, they're three-dimensional, well-planned ones.

Even if Rockwell's designs never enter the architectural canon, he has fans in unusual places. He has collaborated with Diller + Scofidio, the most cerebral, academic architectural studio of the moment. (It has just beat out several big-name firms in a competition to design the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.) Rockwell invited Diller + Scofidio to work on a project that was never built, but the two firms got on so well that they worked together on building a viewing platform at ground zero in New York City.

"Most people don't understand our involvement with David," says Liz Diller, one of the partners, who's a professor of architectural design at Princeton. "But I was stunned by how similar our thinking was, even though the results are so different. He's a thinker — a guy who can analyze things."

Their next collaboration could be an airport — Rockwell's itching to design one. He just discovered that his proposal for the new Singapore airport won't fly. It had aquariums at the curb to remind people of sea level and a huge indoor aviary at the departure gate to evoke the wonder of flight. He has also been inundated with offers to design more Broadway-show sets, which he's less eager to do. He's looking for something new: opera, maybe.

Even when designing the types of buildings he has done so many times before — restaurants, hotels and entertainment venues — he's looking for new stuff with which to build them. His offices are littered with experimental treatments of glass and fabrics. "It's exciting not to know all the answers before you start," he says. In the tentatively named Art Hotel in London, he's trying to build a glass flue above the fireplace, and glass trees. He would like to do a blow-up theatrical set, where high-pressure pumps inflate and deflate the set pieces as needed.

In that way, Rockwell is like us. He understands our desire for the Next Thing, for something we haven't seen or done before. He shares our longing to have each experience be just a little bit bigger and more resonant than the last — our need to look at holographic fish while we eat sushi. And he knows our attention span is short, because his is too. What makes Rockwell different from other artists is that instead of being dismayed by our growing collective add, he embraces it. One of the many reasons he found designing the sets for Hairspray gratifying, he says, is that "in architecture, you don't get 1,300 people getting to their feet and telling you how they feel about your work every night."