Drama From the Floor Up

You’d expect a boffo resume from David Rockwell, architect of the Kodak Theatre. Oscar’s intended home at Hollywood and Highland will, after all, likely be scrutinized by hundreds of millions of people around the planet next March when ABC broadcasts the 74th annual Academy Awards ceremony. So you’d hope the guy in charge would have a degree from a notable architectural school, and Rockwell does (New York’s Syracuse University). You’d figure he would have a bundle of prestigious clients ready to sing his praises, and Rockwell does (Sony, Disney, Radio City Music Hall). What you might not expect is a man who has a credit in “The Rocky Horror Show” Playbill.

But he does.

Rockwell worked as set designer last year for the 25th anniversary Broadway revival of “Rocky Horror,” and his talent for rendering space in grand theatrical terms may just prove to be this New York architect’s most important contribution to the Kodak. Architecture as an event? Rockwell gets it.

“My interest in theater started as a kid,” says Rockwell, 45. “My mother was a dancer in vaudeville. Do you know the Ted Lewis song ‘Me and My Shadow’? She was the shadow. As I got older, she directed community theater. I’m the youngest of five children, and we’d all be in her shows, or you’d stage-manage it, and that was the first place where I learned about being able to design an environment that is about celebration.

“I thought theater was a magical place,” he continues. “So I kind of brought that approach to architecture.”

Los Angeles theatergoers will have their first chance to catch a glimpse of the Kodak venue, tucked inside the new Hollywood and Highland complex, on Nov. 12, at Theatre LA’s Ovation Awards, followed by “Bear in the Big Blue House,” which begins a four-day run on Nov. 15. Next up: the American Ballet Theatre’s “Nutcracker,” which opens Dec. 14. The touring production of “The Full Monty” takes up residence beginning April 6.

(At press time, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences executive director Bruce Davis predicted a “better than 50%” chance that the telecast would take place at the Kodak, pending the resolution of long-standing security issues with TrizecHahn, developers of the Hollywood and Highland complex where the Kodak is located.)

But on a recent sweltering afternoon, singing bears and tutus were nowhere to be seen. Just dust and scaffolding and the skeletal guts of a dark, domed theater lurching toward completion. Rockwell, slightly frayed after a morning flight from New York, puts down his briefcase on the second floor of the three-level theater and points toward the balcony. He’s not really looking at the hardware. He’s picturing the people.

“If you squint, you can imagine ... with all the cherrywood millwork in the balcony and the aisle lights, which are encased in cast glass, and the reflected light, it’s going to make people look great.”

Creating spaces that make people look great wasn’t on the syllabus at Syracuse, where Rockwell learned the principles of lean, clean design. “Having a strong Modernist education was a great background for me, because if you take away the surfaces, what you have in a project like this is a series of spaces that have been very carefully considered.”

But the sumptuous decorative flourishes in evidence at the Kodak have nothing to do with Minimalist understatement and everything to do with creating a literal glow. Curtains, Rockwell says, will be made of two shades of iridescent fabric. A fine bronze mesh stretches over the top of the proscenium to provide a shimmering frame for the stage. Says Rockwell, “I think taking a generous approach to materials that feel wonderful and create a sense of delight is not a detraction from the more spatial part of it.”

A few years after graduating in 1979 from Syracuse, Rockwell made a splash in New York design circles with a dramatic, neon-lighted environment he crafted for a chic New York eatery called Sushi-Zen. “They had this crazed hysterical sushi chef who would chase people around with a knife,” Rockwell recalls, with apparent fondness. “What’s interesting with restaurants is working with chefs who have these very strong points of view, which to me is much more fun than having a given style that I bring to each project.”

In 1984, the architect formed his own company, the Rockwell Group, which for several years specialized in restaurant and hotel commissions, including the Grand Central Terminal restaurant and W Hotel, both in New York. “It wasn’t that I had a particular interest in restaurants at the time,” he says, “But I was becoming very passionate about the merger of theater and public spaces. These were great places for experimentation and collaboration.”

By the time Rockwell finished building the permanent home for the Cirque du Soleil in Orlando, Fla., he had proved himself a quick-on-his-feet team player. A good thing, because the Kodak’s no-divas-allowed design process involved lots of meetings, lots of “input,” lots of cooperation.

Rockwell says, “Creating the theater space for Cirque du Soleil was really more spontaneous and collaborative, and I was sort of in love with their creative process. So I found the multiple program requirements here energizing, rather than being a pain in the neck. To me, it really is about the process.”

Which is a good thing. Because when Rockwell came on board four years ago, TrizecHahn, the San Diego-based developer of the Hollywood and Highland project had already established some key parameters. Foremost: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would control the theater’s technical specifications.

Longtime Oscar conductor Bill Conti told Rockwell exactly what the orchestra pit should look like. A floor plan was laid down with masking tape, specifying where each of 77 musicians should be placed. Ten-time Oscar producer Gil Cates, who for years shuttled between the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Shrine Auditorium to oversee the Oscar telecast but won’t serve as producer next year, laid down his requirements for weight-bearing floors, fire regulations, and other production needs.

“This was a complicated thing. It was great to be able to say, ‘Hey look, part of the problem is the elephant door,’ ” says Cates, referring to the oversized backstage entrances that serve as a loading portal for scenery and props.

Rockwell did more homework, attending three Oscar shows, where he witnessed firsthand the broadcast’s technical demands. Then he devised what he calls “the heart and soul” of the theater: a media cockpit in the center of the ground floor, which can be hydraulically lifted to connect with lower-level technical areas and dressing rooms.

“There were a lot of aesthetic concerns and a lot of functional concerns about how to get this theater to do what it needs to do, which is to be a great live theater facility and a live media broadcast facility and a facility that’s going to be seen by most people on TV.

“This is the only theater I can think of where camera angles from the stage looking back [onto the audience] were an important part of the design process,” Rockwell says. “We wanted to create an iconic space for people to see.”

Pointing to the strips that frame the opera boxes and arch across the domed ceiling, Rockwell says, “Did I mention those ribs also serve as a way to get cable from one side of the theater to the other?”

The crowning achievement of the Kodak might well be the literal crown of the theater, which Rockwell calls the Tiara. Centered on the ceiling is an elongated oval interlaced with several smaller ovals, all coated in silver leaf.

The Tiara was modeled after a floor pattern Rockwell saw in Rome at Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, an outdoor courtyard framed by three ancient buildings. Well, that and Busby Berkeley. The architect says that he wanted to emulate the ever-expanding profusion of forms demonstrated by Berkeley’s famous dance sequences.

But the Tiara also serves a practical purpose. “That oval ring that you see is obviously a decorative piece but is also a large front-of-house lighting position. There’s so many great theaters that you go to and when you see a show in there, they have to put up a big lighting truss in front to do the lighting. This is one of the things where we were able to incorporate state-of-the-art theater technology into the design.”

“David has a great sense of theatricality that he brought to bear. He also has a good sense of judgment,” says TrizecHahn President Lee Wagman. “David knew when to say, ‘Well, we can change it this way,’ but he also knew when to say, ‘No, you shouldn’t change this.’ For example, he refused at any time to consider anything that would impact the Tiara. He said, ‘This is a really defining element to the space,’ and he was absolutely right.”

While Rockwell served at the pleasure of the academy in terms of production specs, he took full command of the theater’s aesthetics. Before arriving at his vision for the Kodak, he took a look around the country at contemporary venues of 3,000-plus seats and was not impressed. “There’s a whole category of theaters that were built as multiple-purpose houses that seemed to create equally uninteresting spaces for every use they suited,” he says. “I knew we didn’t want to do that, so that led us away from a wide, fan-shaped horizontal plan to something vertical and more intimate.

“We carved this space so that people would have as intimate a relationship with the stage as possible. We do that by pushing the balconies as far forward as you can.”

Rockwell turned to European opera houses for inspiration. He made a “pilgrimage” to the Campo, a public space from ancient Roman times in Siena, Italy. He soaked up the exuberance of the 1908 Art Nouveau Palau de la Musica in Barcelona by Luis Domenech i Montaner, which includes a dramatic entrance with a mural of Beethoven in the throes of inspiration.

Among America’s great old venues, Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Theater in Chicago inspired Rockwell with its graceful proscenium. Rockwell also took cues from Radio City Music Hall, which he’s helping to renovate for a spring show, and Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre, home to “The Lion King,” which he helped refurbish as part of Manhattan’s 42nd Street/Times Square redevelopment.

Rockwell drew on more personal sources of inspiration to configure the grand spiral staircase connecting the three-level lobby. Gesturing toward the glittering wall, Rockwell says, “These are thousands of glass beads that are adhered to the wall with retro reflective paint, so they have very high light gain, so when you see the lights up there they’ll really sparkle. As a kid, I remember thinking movie screens were made out of small glass beads. Actually, they’re made out of very fine ground glass. But this was kind of an attempt to create a material that fills the fantasy of what movie screens were.”

Rockwell revels in the Old Hollywood associations found in his new theater’s neighborhood: the Roosevelt Hotel across the street, where the first Oscars were held in 1929; the El Capitan Theater, the Pantages, and the Chinese. Even the cheesy souvenir shops and pizza joints have their place, he says. “I think where projects becomes interesting is in collisions and edges, so I think the edge between what’s already here and what’s new is really fascinating. Hopefully, the layers and layers of kind of eccentricity that Hollywood’s developed will continue to develop all around this project and infiltrate it.”

Navigating his way down Hollywood Boulevard toward Kodak’s grand entrance, Rockwell says, “When we got involved, the decision of where the theater went was largely determined.” The theater building would not be curbside but was instead to be tucked back into the Hollywood and Highland complex. “As opposed to seeing that as a detriment,” he continues, “we felt it made more sense to celebrate that sense of procession. So we decided to make use of the placement, a la ‘lemon, lemonade.’ ”

Rockwell’s solution: a splendiferous limestone portal framed by a 40-foot glass curtain that beckons visitors into the complex’s arrival area. It’s Rockwell’s take on an old show-biz tradition. “Marcus Loew invented the saying ‘The show starts at the sidewalk.”’ Rockwell says. “The movie palaces in their golden days in the ‘20s were these amazing places, so there was that point of view that interested us.

“If you think about great theatrical spaces--if you think about the Paris Opera House, for example--the memory is as much about the lead up to the theater: The procession, the stairs, the lobby, the chance to meet, the shared passion of the people who have showed up. That was in some ways our inspiration here.” *