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You chose architecture as a career, did your friends or family encourage you or suggest that you pursue this career?
Well, I grew up in Mexico. I began to look at my surroundings differently while we lived there. The market, the landscape…it was such a change from Chicago. I’m from a large family, and my mom was a musical theater choreographer, so we were always putting on performances. I just got hooked on the theater and my surroundings, and it translated to built space and lighting design as I grew up. Fortunately my family gave me the positive, go-for-it type of pressure to pursue my interests.
What do you consider to be your greatest professional and most interesting accomplishments?
What I find inspiring and interesting is the range of projects Rockwell Group has the ability to undertake; from set design, to hotels, to a 1.5 million square foot casino, to a children's hospital, and to open very
soon, a new theatre for the Academy Awards!!
Where do you get your ideas or inspirations for your projects?
We brainstorm with ideas from performance arts like film, pop culture or storytelling to inspire our designs. Other visual arts such as sculpture, landscape design and site-specific installations motivate our design process as well. Sometimes we draw from methods of construction, mixing high-tech with handcraft to produce an object with a new feel.
The theater sets designed by Boris Aronson have always been a big inspiration for me. I am especially captivated by his set for Fiddler on the Roof. He made an incredible scene to represent the town of Anatevka that really sunk in to my imagination.
Are you ever intimidated by a project?
I think there are always a few butterflies that come at the beginning of any project, especially the first type of project. We’ve been very successful with our firsts: Cirque du Soleil, Best Cellars, Mohegan Sun Casino, W New York Hotel. We were new to the fields of theater, retail, casino, and hotel design and came up with fresh ideas for each project.
Is there any theme or message that you are trying to convey with your work?
It depends on the project. For theater design, we try to amplify the story, our hospitals try to convey a sense of comfort and learning, for sports projects we create a vibrant, charged fan experience. Basically we want to reveal the story embedded within each project and promote interaction between the visitors and the space.
Would you ever suffer quality for budget restraints or time restraints?
Well, that’s the mark of a good designer, the ability to shift an original design to meet the demands of the restraints that pop up along the way. The changes we might make are equally appealing architecturally, but they fit more conveniently into the construction requirements.
You have designed a new state-of-the-art Children’s Hospital in New York, what is different or unique about that hospital?
Combining a hospital with Carl Sagan's philosophies and empowering the patients with the ability to direct their own care is completely new and unexpected. On a more individual basis, we have added details such as window shades that depict what the Bronx looked like seventy, a hundred thousand and 65 million years ago as a way to integrate a learning-is-cool-and-all-around-you attitude.
You designed the Planet Hollywood restaurants, what interested you most about the theme restaurant business?
I’ve always had a passion for the theater, and that translates into creating engaging, lively experiences for guests within architecture that may or may not have a specific theme. I want visitors to restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and zoos to have an interactive, more personal experience.
As the interest in theme restaurants has fallen, did you feel in any way discouraged from the restaurant design business?
The variety of successful simultaneous projects allowed us to weather the bumps of the theme restaurant business. My goal is to vary the types of projects so that we can maintain a creative, vibrant workplace that succeeds within any project type.
You designed the set of the Broadway Musical Show the Rocky Horror Show. That seems to have been very different from anything else you had previously designed, was that a fun project?
That project was loads of fun! Theater is one of my passions, and to create an amazing setting for such an eye-popping story was a fantastic experience.
What advice would you give teens that wish to become architects, and what schools could you recommend?
Begin to think about what’s surrounding you. Why does it look or feel a certain way? How is it organized and constructed?
I gained a lot from my education at Syracuse. We’ve also hired architects and designers from Harvard, Yale, Pratt, Parsons, University of Virginia, North Carolina State University and Princeton to name a few.
TeenFX has heard that you love movies what would you say in your opinion are the top 2 or 3 movies of all time, and what do you plan to see this summer?
I do love movies, it’s tough to choose. I enjoy anything by Fellini or Tim Burton, as well as the movie Day of the Locust (1975, directed by John Schlesinger). I’m also intrigued by movies that depict Hollywood or those from the classic era of film like King Kong or Sunset Boulevard.
This summer I mostly look forward to taking some time off to be with my family. Hopefully I can slip away to Planet of the Apes on one of the hotter nights during the summer.
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