With a desire to create immersive environments, Rockwell Group takes a cross-disciplinary approach to its inventive array of projects. Based in downtown New York with satellite offices in Madrid and Dubai, our innovative, internationally acclaimed architecture and design firm specializes in hospitality, cultural, healthcare, educational, product, theater and film design.  Crafting a unique and individual narrative concept for each project is fundamental to Rockwell Group's successful design approach. From the big picture to the last detail, the story informs and drives the design. The seamless synergy of technology, craftsmanship and design is reflected in environments that combine high-end video technology, handmade objects, special effects and custom fixtures and furniture.

Past projects include the Chambers hotel (New York); W New York and W Union Square; the Walt Disney Family Museum (San Francisco); Aloft hotels, Starwood Hotel & Resort’s new urban roadside oases; “Hall of Fragments,” the entrance installation to the 2008 11th annual Venice Architecture Biennale; the Kodak Theatre, home of the Academy Awards ceremony (Los Angeles); set design for the 2009 81st Academy Awards; Canyon Ranch Miami Beach; Casinos of the Earth, Sky and Wind at Mohegan Sun Casino (Uncasville, CT); interior work and brand conceptualization for the jetBlue terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport; the Broadway musicals “Hairspray” and “Legally Blonde;” the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore; Adour Alain Ducasse at The St. Regis New York; Nobu restaurants worldwide including New York, Hong Kong, Melbourne, and Dubai; Bar American; Gordon Ramsay’s Maze (London); and a collection of wall coverings for Maya Romanoff. Currently projects include the Elinor Bunin-Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center; Morgans Hotel Group’s Ames Hotel (Boston); Maialino in the Gramercy Park Hotel (New York); and Crystals, the central retail and dining component of MGM Mirage’s CityCenter in Las Vegas.

In May 2009 Rockwell Group broke ground on Imagination Playground at Burling Slip in the South Street Seaport area of Lower Manhattan, a public-private partnership with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.  Imagination Playground is a rich environment of diverse materials that encourages unstructured child-directed “free play,” the very sort of activity that is vital to developing cognitive, social and emotional skills. Through a partnership with KaBoom!, the leading non-profit dedicated to playground development all over the country, Rockwell Group will be offering fixed-site and other scalable models of Imagination Playground to communities nationwide.

Pleasure: The Architecture and Design of Rockwell Group, was published by Universe, a division of Rizzoli Books in 2002.  Spectacle by David Rockwell with Bruce Mau – a book examining the history and public fascination with larger-than-life manmade events – was published by Phaidon Press in October 2006.

David Rockwell was honored with the 2009 Pratt Legends Award, the 2008 National Design Award by Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt for outstanding achievement in Interior Design, a lifetime achievement award from Interiors magazine, an induction in Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame and the Presidential Design Award for his work for the Grand Central Terminal renovation. Rockwell serves as Chairman of the Board of the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA), and as a board member of City-Meals-on-Wheels and the Public Theater.  He is a member of the CooperHewittNationalDesignMuseum’s committee on Exhibitions.