David Rockwell, Rockwell Group

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here today with the wonderful David Rockwell. David, thank you so much for joining us.

David Rockwell: Thanks for having me.

SSR: Such a pleasure. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

DR: I grew up in a bunch of places sort of collaged together, a little bit like our work. I was born in Chicago and left when I was pretty young. I think I 3,  three and a half. I moved to the Jersey Shore to a number of different places, ultimately living in Deal, New Jersey. And when I was 12, we moved to Mexico, to Guadalajara, Mexico and that’s where I went to high school and then came back for college.

SSR: Wonderful. My dad grew up surfing in Deal.

DR: Wow. Have you been there?

SSR: Yeah. My parents still live down there.

DR: Lots of big Bob Stern homes in Deal.

SSR: Yes. So was there any first memories of design or hospitality growing up? Did your parents influence you at all?

DR: Well, my mom influenced me in a couple of different ways. One is she loved to entertain, and we did have a great house for entertaining. And the other thing that was very influential for me was the Jersey Shore, the summers were all spent outdoors on the beach. So hospitality, nothing was better than a great hotdog and an afternoon on the beach. And she helped to start a community theater group there which, at a very young age, got me really interested in how design and storytelling took this very sleepy community of big private homes and made everyone right out of Waiting for Guffman. Sort of made everyone more acting out, and I just found it fascinating to see everyone wanted to participate in making this thing together, and design was the element that intrigued me the most.

SSR: I remember when you were our guest editor, you also said that Mexico had really great influence on how cities worked and how communities worked.

DR: Well, the move to Mexico was, in retrospect, a totally critical part of my journey around design. So Guadalajara was really like Deal turned inside out. The homes were small and everything took place on the public streets and I was immediately attracted to a couple of things about Mexico. One is the marketplace which was and is a fascinating example of public space and commerce and market, and I found it so joyful. The other thing, in terms of hospitality, is there were many places where we’d go eat that were only open one day a week. Little homes that would serve a special meal, pozole one day a week, or right near where we lived, an incredible taco stand with these great bottles of colored aguas and different fruit drinks. And those impressions, that sense of color, has really merged with my interest in theater and those have been, I think, two of the seminal influences.

SSR: Very cool. And did you stay in Mexico for college or did you come back here?

DR: No, I came back to Syracuse University. I wanted to be near New York, I think I felt the magnetic pull of New York very early on. And then I studied in London at the Architectural Association. But I always knew I was going to work in New York, it was one of those no-brainers. My first memories of New York were right before we left for Mexico, we came into the city and I saw my first Broadway show, I went to my first New York City restaurant, and I was pretty hooked from then on.

SSR: Do you remember what those were?

DR: Absolutely. The show was Fiddler on the Roof and it was at the Majestic Theater. Or maybe it was at the Winter Garden, it moved. No, it was at the Imperial to begin with and then I think it went to the Winter Garden when I saw it, I’d have to check. I have a Playbill from when I saw it. With Herschel Bernardi. I’ve since, that was a long time ago, become a real collector of Boris Aronson’s work, and it was mind boggling for a 12 year old to see that. And we had lunch at Schrafft’s which was the place to go before matinee, and there were many of them all over the city. It’s a really interesting history, Schrafft’s. And what I remember about that is, it was the first time sitting with my brothers that dining wasn’t like a competitive sport of who could get the last piece of chicken. So those experiences stayed with me.

SSR: And at Syracuse, did you study design?

DR: I studied architecture. I did a five-year bachelor of architecture program. And every summer I would come to New York and work in some facet of design. Actually, ultimately working for Roger Morgan and a Broadway lighting designer. So I could help by drafting details, but I got immersed in a little bit of thinking about these amazing buildings in New York and producing theater in those.

SSR: And how did you decide to study architecture? Was that a conscious decision, or something you wanted to just try out and see what happened. How did you lead to that discipline?

DR: I think all those decisions in the rear view mirror look much clearer than they were when you made them. My memory was I got very interested in a lot of the architecture in Mexico. There was a lot of cast in place concrete, very interested in the use of basic forms. I remember loving and sketching the bull ring next to the marketplace. And I thought it was an interesting way to go, I was also intrigued by piano. I had considered studying piano and was serious for about two years from 15 to 16, not as serious as I am now about piano but I was very into it. And then I went to look at schools. When I started to look at the architecture of schools, it was a kind of “A-ha” moment for me. I liked the idea of the process. I loved the studio notion. I liked the hands-on. I was always making things as a kid. I always had a space, it was my black box theater to bring other people into. So it was a kind of slow, organic decision that ultimately became the right decision.

SSR: You said you worked for Roger Morgan, were there any other early jobs that helped you on the path that you took?

DR: Well, all of them. I worked for Roger Morgan, I worked for John Stork who’s a recording studio designer, I worked for Ken Walker of the Walker Group. I worked for an amazing firm called Imero Fiorentino Associates. It was a large group of TV lighting designers and some architects and theater designers. He first outside consultant to work for Disney; he was lighting Epcot and they needed an architect on the team so I became that architect.

SSR: What was that like?

DR: Surreal and amazing. It was a great place to work, and it was a great culture and it made me think about the idea that what the work environment is like affects what the work ultimately is like.

SSR: How did you decide to go out on your own and launch Rockwell Group?

DR: Again, everything looks neater. I was working for John Stork at the time and I designed a club called the Wild Cat Saloon while working for him. And at the opening night someone approached me about doing a restaurant. I was probably 24, 25, and at that age you have no fear. And one of the things I’ve realized looking back at that is that moment of making a decision that is a little bit terrifying, but at the same time, you feel like you can really dive into it, is something we talk about at Rockwell Group. You don’t want to make crazy leaps but I thought it was a good idea. We designed the restaurant, which was about a five-week design and construction time to renovate Le Perigord, which is now since gone. And I brought in the scenic shop from La Mama, an experimental Lower East Side theater group, to build it. We worked 24 hours a day, different shifts. And that led to being offered Sushi Zen, which was a restaurant.

It’s funny, when people come out of school and work here, one of the things I try and coach people on is don’t put every idea you’ve ever had into your first project. I didn’t take that advice in Sushi Zen, it was really cathartic, lots of things I’d been thinking about, it was a wonderful, wonderful, terrifying experience. And that’s what sort of launched my belief that I could create a studio and how hospitality became a real anchor to it.

SSR: Talk about your firm a little bit: the culture, the people. You’re still in the same space that you’ve been in, you’ve just grown over floors. And you talked a little bit about it, but how do you bring out the best in people and help to continue to inspire and motivate? Because you now have 250 people right?

DR: I once asked Danny Meyer, how does he train his staff to be so both hospitable and unique? Because there’s not a standard way to be, I find, at one of Danny’s restaurants. And he said, ‘You sort of have to hire them that way.’ So one of the things we try to do is hire people who are naturally curious. I think people are attracted to work here because we very much try and craft a unique mission, and we love what we do. I think that willingness to have everyone have a voice, to take risks, to not accept the first or second or third idea, to allow people to make mistakes, to push way outside of your comfort zone.

I never expected the studio to be this size and that was never a goal, but what happened is there were so many different project types we wanted to do, and I believe one of the things that makes us unique is the intersection of different projects. It helps us not look at the same solution. I’m working on a book that comes out next year that looks at the relationship of theater and architecture. Because I think it’s that intersection at Rockwell Group we find so thrilling and unique. The other thing is, there are people who have been here 15 to 20 years, and I think there’s a culture where we can bring younger designers along and they can make a difference right away. You’re not stuck in a: ‘I’m going to do door handle slums for three years.’

SSR: So what do you think are your biggest challenges? What keeps you up at night with running such a large and important firm?

DR: Well, there are two versions of being kept up at night right? There’s the version of it where I’m very obsessed with trying to solve a problem. Those are good versions of staying up at night and trying to look at a problem differently. We do a ton of research so sometimes I’ll be thinking about all the various points of view of the project and trying to hone it down to that unique narrative. The other version of being kept up at night, which is not such a good version, is dealing with the fact that every project doesn’t have enough time or enough money. And we’ve had projects with a lot of time and a lot of money. And ultimately, you have to make decisions about priorities, and those are challenging and hard in real time with large groups to define an idea that’s strong enough to survive all the realities. Budget reality, schedule reality. So those are the two things. But what helps me go to sleep is playing piano and sketching before I go to bed. I think I do my best sketching right before bed.

SSR: You even have a piano room here in the office.

DR: I do. That was a slow build. I started piano about three and a half years ago, and I had always wanted to get back to it, and met this inspiring teacher, Seymour Bernstein, who’s now 93, and really the Yoda of piano. So as I started to play more and more piano, I thought having a piano here in the office would be good, so I had an upright piano that lived upstairs and people sort of liked hearing me practice. And then I thought, ‘Well, I should get a really great instrument,’ so it’s a conference room for two or three people and it’s a piano room. But it’s a great way to totally get out of your head about design and focus on something else. I had Jules Fisher, the Broadway lighting designer, over not long ago in the piano room, and it was interesting because we talked about the overlap of lighting and piano, so there are things I’m learning about design from piano.

SSR: You learn something new every day.

DR: You do.

SSR: Let’s go back to the whole idea of intersection of theater and hospitality. How do you use all the work that you’ve done on Broadway, everything you learned growing up as a kid, and how do you infuse that in hospitality? How do let them speak to each other? What’s the process like there?

DR: Well, I think the biggest difference between theater and hospitality is the tool kits are very different. So in theater you’re dealing with movement and choreography, you know for a fact it’s not built to stand the test of time and you’re in real time collaborating with a lot of other people: choreographers, lighting designers. In restaurants, really from the beginning, from Sushi Zen on, I believed in crafting a backstory or a narrative that helped make every decision not arbitrary. So the original Nobu grew out of us extracting in conversations with Nobu and with Drew and with De Niro, a point of view about how Nobu wanted his Japanese food to be perceived and the “A-ha” moment, much like in a play or in a musical, you don’t want the set doing the same thing the actors are doing. There’s an interesting saying, ‘Don’t put a hat on a hat.’ So if the scene is funny, you don’t necessarily want the backdrop to be funny. The environment is really the changeable space.

So with Nobu, when we found the way in, that he was from the countryside, he wasn’t from the city, and his influences were both South American, both taste and visual influences from Peru, marrying that with the mastery of sushi became a way to create, I think, the first 3-Star restaurant experience that didn’t have a table cloth. So it was a new way to deal with luxury. And that’s been a big influence on our firm, is thinking about the changing expectations that people have about luxury.

The other overlaps are front doors to restaurants, to me, are the proscenium curtains of restaurants. They’re how you’re introduced to those rules and no one is comfortable walking into a restaurant for 250 people if you’re the first 10 people. So we just did Oceans on Park Avenue, 19th Street, and the choreography of the entrance into that entry barrel vault is as choreographed as a Broadway show so that the first 10 people don’t enter on access to the big space. So there are those kinds of overlaps too.

SSR: What was it like redesigning or rethinking Nobu, what, two decades later a couple years ago in a new space and a very different space? And also now taking that restaurant which was so defining and ahead of its time and creating a hotel brand around it?

DR: Nobu’s been the greatest gift imaginable. It’s the thing you don’t get a lot as an architect is a long term relationship. You get it more in theater, directors and set designers spend decades working together. In most cases, a client in architecture isn’t producing something very year. So the first leap for us was Nobu 57th Street, which was taking what, I believe, was a $600,000 budget for the first Nobu and creating a $12 million multilevel restaurant.

But we did go back to a lot of the same influences, although when we went back to natural landscape as opposed to going to Kabuki theater and trees, which were the driving forces of the first Nobu, we looked more at sea forms and created those abaca and wire fluid shapes. Downtown Nobu was a chance to, by that point the Nobu team very much trusted us, and we were able to push into entirely new levels of the idea and also every space has its constraints and its opportunities, so Downtown was a landmark space upstairs where nothing could exist above eight feet. So we had the idea to have all the furniture be the lighting. That was a great insight for us in how to create that, and downstairs has no natural light at all, it’s an 11-foot space and by that point, again, the Nobu team trusted us and we were able to involve many other artists and craftsmen. Part of the Nobu journey has been always involving other interesting makers and craftsmen.

SSR: And now you’ve designed a couple of hotels and Nobu Barcelona, the newest and greatest, how has that been, starting in Vegas and moving on?

DR: When we started the first Nobu in Vegas, which was the first Nobu hotel, one of my observations was much like Nobu was sort of saying if a luxury meal is two and a half hours, what if the new luxury is an hour and a half meal and you get the hour back to do other things in your life? So, it was a simplified luxury. And in fact, at the first Nobu and every Nobu since, there is no décor at the table. So there’s nothing competing with the food once you get to the table.

With the hotel, I thought it was an interesting opportunity that the luxury hotel market was not related to any kind of a curator. So we went to the idea of omakase. When you go to a Japanese restaurant you basically entrust your menu to whatever the chef will think of and you’re open to new experiences, and we thought, well, why don’t we apply that to the hotel? Let’s keep it very simple. And we had the great godsend of the first one being in Caesars Palace, which is the most baroque, over-the-top place in the world, so the comparative simplicity of the rooms has such a striking contrast. And so we set the foundation of the hotels being about this curated omakase experience and that’s continued in Barcelona. In many ways, including the entry, you enter into this one space that, much like 57th Street, which has a woven abaca ceiling, this has saffron South American colors that are very similar to the sense of color in Barcelona, leading up to a restaurant with a cracked tile ceiling that is certainly related to a traditional Japanese technique of cracking ceramics but also closely related to Gaudí and his use of cracked tile in Park Güell. So we found those intersections.

SSR: How did you meet Nobu?

DR: I met Nobu because I was doing work for Meals on Wheels. I don’t think I was on the board yet; I’ve been on the board I think 20 years. And I was designing an event called the Feast of the Many Moons that took place at the South Street Seaport in a place called Bridgewaters we had designed. And I had been up two nights in a row, lashing these glowing moons, and I got to try the food, which was the great Asian chefs from around the world. I tried Nobu’s food, I was doing Vong at the time which was Jean-Georges’ first restaurant after Lafayette. I approached Drew and I said, ‘The rock shrimp is amazingm and I’d really like to do Nobu’s restaurant when he comes to New York.’ He said, ‘Well, you need to meet Nobu,’ so I went to Matsuhisa and tried his food, and I needed to meet Bob De Niro, which I did, and each one had their unique requirements.

I do think you don’t have to wait around for the phone to ring. I was speaking to the son of a friend of mine who’s just starting architecture and he said, ‘Well, how do I figure out what I want to do in the world of architecture?’ And I said, ‘Just figure out what you like, start to sketch what you like.’ So I knew that I was more and more intrigued by restaurants. I love the food, and I decided to try being pushy.

SSR: And how did you get in the theater space? You get to work on very cool Broadway shows as well as you get to design the set of the Oscars, which you won an [Emmy] for. So talk about that experience a little bit.

DR: Again, you have to just look at the 10 yards in front of you, and for me, I was more and more interested in theater. I actually gave a talk at the TED Conference the first time in ’94, I think, maybe ’95, and Richard Wurman, who runs the TED Conference said, ‘David, whatever you do, don’t just promote your work, talk about something you’re a fan of, not what you do for a living.’ And I had studied theater and worked in the theater so I put together this way overly produced talk on the relationship of theater and architecture. And then I actually spent five years meeting with directors, sketching. It took five years of false starts. And like most things, the solution is not intuitive at all.

I was offered The Rocky Horror Show revival on Broadway, and I’d never seen it because I’d been in Mexico for the six years where I would have seen it. I rented the DVD and I came back and said to the director, ‘Why would anyone want to do this, I don’t understand it.’ And he said, ‘You have to see it with a live audience, it’s about inventing yourself with your own persona.’ So it became the best first show ever, which I almost didn’t do because I didn’t get it.

And the Oscars came about from the book Spectacle. And several people involved in the Oscars knew I had done the Kodak Theater as an architect, which opened in 2002, and thought since I had been doing theater, I did Hairspray also in 2002, that I might have some insight into the Oscars. And that was fascinating because I got to look at a building I had done six years before, and as a designer, got to critique what I did.

SSR: What was it like winning an Emmy and a Tony for all this work?

DR: Unbelievably surreal and wonderful. I suppose it would be better to say winning doesn’t matter, just being nominated, but they were both amazing moments and both examples of experiences that were so important to our studio and so important to me creatively. But it’s interesting, the Tony was won by She Loves Me, which was a limited run done by the Roundabout, and actually I got to meet one of my heroes because it was written by the same man who wrote Fiddler on the Roof that I saw when I was 12. So I got to meet this hero of mine and work with him.

SSR: That’s amazing. Full circle.

DR: Full circle.

SSR: You talk about Nobu but you also have Danny Meyer, TAO Group, the Moxy brand, you have a lot of longterm clients, people that come back to you for solutions. What do you think is your secret to success for working with these wonderful, amazingly talented people and continuing that journey together, that longevity that, like you said about Nobu, a dream, it doesn’t always happen.

DR: I think it starts with having a great team. So I have two amazing partners, Greg Keffer and Shawn Sullivan. I’ve got a team of four business leaders, Nina Stern who’s our director of operations, Joan MacKeith who’s our director of marketing and PR, Dawn Condon who’s our CFO, and LeAnn Shelton who’s our head of legal, who really are a incredibly supportive group that allows all the creators to do their work and focus on the creative part. So I think that balance is part of it and I think we love what we do. I think clients, they don’t just want a product, they want a relationship. And being willing to admit you don’t know the answer, being willing to delve into new directions, I think perceiving that getting the right design built is life and death, which I think that’s either how you feel about design or you don’t, I don’t think success changes that. It comes down to the last detail.

I often tell theater clients who say, ‘I’m not sure that we need that backdrop,’ I always say, ‘Well. that’s possible. It is also possible that that’s the critical backdrop.’ At the end of the day we’re all just trying to put our best ideas together to figure out how to create spaces where people feel connected and involved. And I think that human centric, that the most important thing to us in our work is how people feel and connect in it, not the design in some abstraction, I think puts us on the same side of the table as clients in a way they appreciate.

SSR: You once said in a talk or interview we did that you design each project like it’s your last, or that’s how you think about each project. How has that led to some of your success do you think?

DR: We’re living in a world in which every design idea is sort of telegraphed immediately through Instagram. There’s an instant feedback system. So I think taking chances and leading a team that’s willing to take chances becomes more a matter of focus and willingness to realize that there is no safe choice. There just is no safe choice and so it’s one of the reasons why we try to be as prepared as we can when we start a project. We do as much research as possible and then with all that you have to conjure a solution. I think recognizing that there is no safe choice. Perhaps my early experience of moving around drilled into me a sense of grabbing the moment and celebrating the moment because who knows what the next moment’s going to be. So I think that’s part of hospitality and part of what we bring to it.

SSR: I think also how well you guys live in these blurred lines right? That you can mesh coworking with hospitality. For instance, Equinox, you married wellness and hospitality for the first time in a very defining way. What was that like working on such a project and creating another new brand, or evolving another brand I should say?

DR: There were some big challenges with that given how many people had a stake in that. So one of the things you have to do is get all of those people to understand there is no safe choice. That was a matter of trying to have an idea that we could sell a large group on. And in fact, one of the things about Equinox that was eye opening is it related to the first W that we did, the very first W, which is thinking about a hotel where you would leave feeling better than when you got there. So that led to the notion of the sleeping chamber.

And hotel rooms, you’re spending your whole time, every detail is under the microscope, can you reach the light switch from your bed, can you get to the bathroom in the dark, there’s all of these hyper-focus problems that you don’t have in any other form of design because you’re spending the night studying the design. So with Equinox we got a chance to really drill down into what would take really the only health club in that global space, there’s no other close second, and create a hotel experience that felt related but not derivative.

SSR: Speaking of the W. That was your first hotel project, correct, in New York on Lexington?

DR: It was our first, yeah.

SSR: Would you say that was one of the more defining projects in your career or do you think Nobu or Sushi Zen?

DR: I think you happened to pick three very defining projects. The first W was a chance to work with Barry Sternlicht, it was his first hotel too, to work with Rande Gerber, and it was a thrilling, terrifying project that we were lucky enough to have a client, Barry [Sternlicht] really knows a lot about design, he was learning then and he was like a sponge, and he was very open to both listen to ideas and critiquing ideas and it was a great, great first hotel.

SSR: And helped kind of change the hotel landscape in so many ways.

DR: Totally. Yeah.

SSR: Did you know or think that was even going to be a possibility throughout the process?

DR: No, you never know. You never have any idea. I remember the first Nobu, about three weeks before it opened, I started to get a lot of calls from every food magazine, and it became clear that it was a big deal but we didn’t know it when we were doing it. We didn’t know it when we were doing the W.

And Hairspray, which was a seminal project for us, began with me going to Baltimore with John Waters and walking around and eating at different sandwich shops and hearing his take on Baltimore.

SSR: How did that even come about?

DR: I had designed The Rocky Horror Show, and the choreographer introduced me to the producer and the director and they said, ‘You should go meet with John Waters and get his eccentric view of the world.’

SSR: That’s amazing. So what is next for you? You’ve done so much, what are you excited about? I know you’re doing your first food market which seems crazy, in my head you’ve done many of them.

DR: My first theater project was after five years of research, so we’ve proposed on several food markets, and I think we have an observation about day parting, which relates to the TED Theater in Vancouver, which is a pop-up theater that’s there for one week and then goes away. I think that that is lessons we’re taking from the impact of ephemeral and bringing that to the built world. So the marketplace, this food hall is going to be an interesting experience in that we’re looking at what changes from day to night, how vendors can get in and out. We’re working on a project in Washington, DC with Johns Hopkins and INSEAD that’s super interesting and looking at the future of schools. I’m doing a show, I think my seventh Broadway show with Scott Ellis, at the Helen Hayes Theater that we were the architects for. So, I don’t think I can complain about the architecture being not flexible enough, I would be in huge trouble.

SSR: Talk a bit about the TED Theater, I think it’s an interesting concept for those that don’t know it. It literally gets built in how many days? 

DR: It gets built in five days and it’s made of about 8,000 pieces of individual timber. It seats 1,300 people and it comes down in two days. And like many things it grew out of a long gestation period, I had been to TED, I had spoken to TED and when they decided to move to Vancouver, I had seen it grow from 600 seats in Monterey to a couple thousand seats in Long Beach, and I had seen it grow from something you had to see live to many more people were seeing it on these TED Talks online. So in thinking about Vancouver, we wanted an experience that privileged live, that made you want to be there. And we went back to thinking about Greek theaters and campfires and places where you’re as close to the center of the heat as possible. In this case it’s an individual speaker.

And there was no theater that could do that, so we suggested this demountable theater, which has really been an incredible success for TED. I’m going back again this year, I haven’t been in a couple years. But it was a masterclass for us in learning a lot of things including, you know when you see buildings with scaffolding? Sometimes they’re more interesting than when the scaffolding comes down? And that was true with, remember the Washington Monument had scaffolding designed by Michael Graves which was very iconic and people talked about how wonderful it looked in transition. So this theater has no skin, it really is a wood scaffolding with 10 different ways to seat because if you’re at a five-day conference you may want to sit close up in a ringside seat or with friends on a sofa. So it accommodates the eccentricity of the program. And I think eccentricities are the key thing to work on with a client is how are they different than everyone else, not how are they the same.

SSR: Is there a project that you haven’t done that you would love to do? You’ve done airports, you’re working on schools, you even did luxury living at Hudson Yards which was really interesting speaking of intersection of hospitality, and those amenity spaces are just as amazing as the lobby space.

DR: And we also got a long working experience with Diller Scofidio + Renfro over 10 years, which was a great opportunity to exchange ideas and points of view. I’d love to do a dormitory. Because I think what’s expected is so shifting. There’s a version of a dormitory that’s in between loft living and co-working in schools that interests me. I’d love to do an opera house. I’d love to do a park. There’s lots left to do. I went out to see the Steinway factory and suggested something to them they’re not doing, but I said why don’t they create a 200 seat music hall made by Steinway makers, which is the ultimate place to play Steinway.

SSR: That would be amazing.

DR: Maybe someday they’ll do it.

SSR: You mentioned Diller Scofidio + Renfro, can you talk a little bit about the shed? I feel like that’s a moving piece of architecture that is so different that lives here in Hudson Yards.

DR: Well that grew out of the city issuing an RFP for ideas for what to do with this one piece of Hudson Yards that had been zone culture. Liz Diller, Ric Scofidio, and Charles Renfro and I talked about it and decided we would go after that together I think in no way expecting it was actually going to happen. So it was an extraordinary process. And we did start out by thinking, ‘Well, the city has thousands of great cultural institutions, what is the future of what artists are going to need? What kind of flexibility will they need in an unknowable future?’ And that’s how we began. And I was actually there last night at a dress rehearsal of a new play called Help, which is incredible, and had a little bite to eat at Cedric’s, which is Danny Meyer’s bar café in the lobby.

SSR: It’s an amazing piece of the institution there. And the skin moves right? For the people that don’t know.

DR: Yeah, it’s got a fixed building and then it’s got a large exoskeleton that moves on wheels that allows you to produce a super large space that’s enclosed when they need it, or, when they don’t need it, it’s an open plaza that can be used for performance so it is infrastructure and space on demand as needed.

SSR: And looking back, many things have changed in this industry, but do you think flexibility is one of the biggest changes you’ve seen, or, I also think right now is the best time for hospitality because we’re influencing so many other disciplines.

DR: It’s always the best time for hospitality, who doesn’t want to have a great drink and a great bite? What’s different right now is how blurred every form is with every other form and I think designers have a real opportunity right now, and that is we spend so much time looking at small, shiny objects that connect us to virtual communities. That those spaces that get us out of the virtual community into the real world have a kind of emotional premium. So I think that’s a particularly great time to be working as a designer. But I’m an optimist so I would think that.

SSR: We always end on two questions here. We always say that you learn more from your mistakes than you do your successes. Has there been one of your mistakes along the way that stayed with you, that you learned the most from?

DR: That’s such an interesting question. I think I’ve learned that if you pay attention to the great reviews you have to pay attention to the bad reviews. And I think the definition of what’s a successful place is so fluid and changing that trying to zero in on what you and your team really want to do is a smarter way to go. I also think if I had to do it over again I would have been playing piano now for 20 years because that’s brought me such incredible joy. I think there’s a lesson to be had in being willing to keep throwing yourself out there, even for projects you don’t get because if you look at the odds and you keep focusing on what you want to do, you’ll find a way to that, so there’s been times I’ve given up on that maybe too easily.

SSR: Do you think that’s been your greatest lesson learned?

DR: My greatest lesson is that focusing on creating places that engage people and create an experience is ultimately more significant than creating an icon that exists in the abstract. It’s really going back to what drove me into design to being with and it really is about how people connect in a space.

SSR: Wonderful. I think that’s a perfect way to end our conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

DR: Thanks for coming by.

SSR: Always.