By Sofia Perez
[Published by Forbes, July 24, 2025]
Despite celebrating the 40th anniversary of his Rockwell Group design firm last year, star architect and designer David Rockwell seems unwilling to rest on his laurels. Although he’s had a hand in crafting some of the world’s most memorable spaces—particularly high-profile restaurants, hotels, and theater projects—he continues to seek out new challenges.
The Interview, Part Two
In part one of our interview, he reflected on his impressive career and talked about some of the considerations that go into building community around the table. In the second half of this discussion, he shines a spotlight on some of the Rockwell Group projects that are waiting in the wings.
Do you think there’s a signature “Rockwell” quality to your projects?
If it’s there, I’m not sure I’m the one to see it because I’m so focused on what we’re doing. (pauses) Maybe one signature is that they look better full than empty. That may be true about every restaurant, but I think we very much look at what a restaurant is like at the height of walking through it, and what it’s like sitting down.
At The View [the revolving restaurant in NYC’s Marriott Marquis Times Square, which reopened in February under the auspices of Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group], you use artwork to help anchor people in a space that’s constantly changing—for example to help diners find their table again after they’ve gotten up to use the restroom. How else do you deploy art in your projects?
If you spend money evenly on a project, you don’t get highlights and lowlights. You have to have a strategy about where to put a disproportionate amount of the resources, and where you’re going to create those landmarks. If the client is interested in artwork, you have to figure out how to embrace that.
I had been going to the original Union Square Cafe for about 15 years before we did the second one, so I was really a student of it. We made a model of the new space and re-created every piece of artwork that [owner] Danny [Meyer] had collected to scale. With tweezers, we set them by each banquette [in the model]. We were creating an entirely new space that was channeling the DNA of the original. At The Corner Store, the owner really wanted to use New York photography, and we were very involved with where it goes, how it’s mounted, and how to orchestrate it.
Has your approach to restaurant design changed over the years?
I’m more interested in the things that have remained. The very first restaurant I did was all about movement and choreography. It was about materiality; I brought in a costume designer from Santa Fe to make a silk mural.
What has stayed is my sense of curiosity, my appreciation. I’m a little less in a hurry. I really take in the moments—how profound it is to create places that people enjoy.
The press materials for your renovation of the W Union Square and its Seahorse restaurant mention a connection to Union Square itself as a place where art and activism have long thrived. How do you capture an abstract idea like activism in a physical space?
We had done the original W Union Square, and now we got to redo it, so we had long thoughts there. My observation about Union Square now versus 22 years ago was that there are things that really relate to the grid of New York, and others that relate to the changeable explosion of color that happens in Union Square—for instance, the chalk art, which we translated to the carpet.
Regarding La Specialitá in Miami, a new outpost of the famed Milan eatery, you’ve talked about creating portals between the two locations. What does that mean in tangible terms?
We engaged Artemest, a group that connects you to Italian artisans. The light fixtures were made by different artisans, many of them from Milan, including a beautiful mosaic piece that gives the bathrooms a kind of sheen. They’re high gloss and have an elevated sense of ritual. I think ritual is very important—dining is very much a set of rituals.
Do you ever look to inject humor into a space?
One person’s version of humor is another person’s pain in the neck. I think we design places with beauty in mind, with flexibility. I think the unexpected relates to humor—juxtapositions create opportunities.
Hairspray was my second Broadway show, and when I met with the director for the first presentation, I filled the conference room with lots and lots of sketches and designs. He looked at all of it, put his arm around me, and said, “Why don’t we take everything out of the room except for those things that make you fall in love with Tracy Turnblad?” It was a real lesson.
The environment doesn’t want to be in the foreground, and I think that’s sort of true about humor. You want to create the setting and the context for it, but not solve the whole problem.
After four decades, are there any dream projects left for you to tackle?
I’d like to be involved with the Olympics—that would be great, having been to the Olympics in Paris, and being a fan of the Olympics. I think there’s something about bringing people together to celebrate excellence. There are a million design problems—problems I’ve solved—about movement, choreography, and sense of place.
How would you define the work of an architect and designer? What’s your mission?
I think it’s to create experiences in places that make the world more connected.
Given your extensive work with restaurants (as opposed to designing office cubicles where people work individually), so much of what you are doing is building spaces that are geared toward connection.
It’s true, and even when we do offices, the parts that I talk about are those that [relate to] connection. I think that’s what drove me to architecture—the idea of creating these temporal communities.
We won’t take a restaurant project if someone wants it to look like something we’ve done before. Each restaurant is a different adventure, a chance to dive into what that chef or operator wants.
It’s amazing to create places. During COVID, we made T-shirts and bags that said, “Buildings are memory machines,” and I think that’s really true.