Rockefeller Center Explored & Explained | Walking Tour | Architectural Digest

hi my name is Adam Ralston and I'm an architect I happen to be working on a project here at Rockefeller Center and today we're going to give you an architectural walking tour of the Rock [Music] so Rock Center often called the heart of New York I think everyone knows famously the plaza that has the Christmas tree the brainchild of John D Rockefeller Jr completed in 1939 was really conceived of as a city within a city the design of the center is very much a collaborative effort but was led by Raymond Hood he beautifully combined Form and Function classic and modern idioms in a very New York style and we're going to go take a look at some of those things here we are at the top of the channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center it is the site of the original Elgin botanical gardens which were the first public botanical gardens in the nation it's called the Channel Gardens as a reference to the English Channel because it's right in between the Maison process and the British Empire Building the most interesting aspect of the channel Garden is that it slopes down towards 30 Rock which opens up the view to Prometheus and the larger building in a slightly forced perspective that shortens it and brings you into the center you can see that art deco Moves In This Very classic architecture one of the most interesting things about Rock Center to me is that it's this interesting combination of both very classic Civic architecture and deeply modern architecture the Limestone the Symmetry all that evokes a kind of you know classical character and yet it's a deeply modern set of buildings and you really see that in 30 Rock where it is almost like a church Tower but as you start to see it three-dimensionally it is this massive office building when it was built not as tall as the Empire State building but actually greater volume than the Empire State Building in its total size [Music] so we made our way down to the famous Rockefeller ice rink you can see the tree behind me Rock Center is one of the most visited sites in New York City but it's also during Christmas because of the tree and because of the rink in 1931 the first Christmas tree was placed here in the plaza and it was actually the construction workers of the complex pulled their money and placed the tree to hear themselves and it was just a modest 20-footer that modest 20-foot tree grew into a tradition and now they run between 80 and 100 feet it's fitting that we're here on the day that the teams here are setting up for Christmas a little bit like the first Christmas tree with the construction workers setting up their tree so the ice skating rink opened on Christmas 1936 and was meant to be temporary but it was so popular that it's been a tradition ever since there's a story or a legend that an ice skate salesman jumped onto the Frozen Fountain and started skating and that was the spark or the idea that prompted the ice skating rink over my shoulder is the sculpture of Prometheus by Paul manship and of course Prometheus stole fire and gave it to The Mortals so you can't see it because of the tree but Zeus the sculpture over 30 Rock is looking down at Prometheus and kind of scolding him so Rockefeller Center was planned as the city of the future and one of those things is a kind of multi-level planning effort that went along with it so there is the retail on the street level all of that action restaurants and then there's a whole lower level that the sunken Plaza was built to connect to although Rockefeller Center was privately developed it gave back to the city that it belonged to and here the public space is the biggest gift [Music] the 30 Rock Lobby one of the few landmarked Interiors in New York City is one of the most beautiful spaces in the city it is literally like one of my favorite spaces in New York and the story of Rockefeller Center's Interiors begins here it's got the drama the mural attenuated vertical reeded columns the horizontal storefront brass and black terrazzo floor it just combines all of the elements of what made Rockefeller Center sexy and romantic in the classic art deco style the Lobby's main feature is the Jose Maria murals titled American progress the Jose Maria murals are a praise poem to both the brains and the brawn of American progress they're both at once classical and modern there's it's a classical style and yet modern imagery from Titan to airplanes the floors are made of black Terrazzo green Terrazzo and bronze inlay and they're a beautiful representation of classic art deco pattern making where a stepping pattern creates this radiating form but then it exists in this beautiful regular grid another great example of the ways in which art is incorporated into the architecture is the glass that is above the entrance at 30 Rock um by Lee Laurie here a sculpture is literally the glass storefront that separates inside from outside the Lee Laurie glass sculpture is a beautiful collaboration between the Architects and the sculptor in the sense that it is structural the architecture is holding up the glass so it's been said that the first columns were made by the Egyptians and they were actually bundles of Papyrus branches and the column Capital was the leaves and those Reeds were not concave but convex which created a kind of convex fluting in the very first columns that you see in Egypt here that's been appropriated to create this convex fluting around the heroic main columns that Mark the entrance to 30 Rock and beautifully uh you know lighting is incorporated into these columns a flute peels away at the top and then even with Incorporated within those flutes is the radiator believe it or not in these brass inlays that you see here so there's a beautiful scaling device of the drama of the vertical columns and the horizontal storefront capped by this brass detail below is the rich dark grounding black granite and then above is the white Plaster and that pulls you into the lobby in this beautiful way that is both great architecture and great wayfinding thank you [Music] here we are at Fitzy Rock just north of the plaza and over my shoulder is the entrance that has isamu nuguchi sculpture above it wrought in stainless steel if the only time you ever worked in stainless steel and somehow naguchi managed to make stainless steel look like Platinum leaf and you can see it in the handwork of the grinder that he used it's incredible texture that he got this sculpture is called news and very much connected to the sculpture throughout the complex where the artwork connects to what's happening on the inside so this was the home of the Associated Press and the sculpture represents that you can see a guy in his typewriter a notepad photographer and you know naguchi was working with the theme of news and directly across from 50 Rock it's a ball Relief by Gaston de chess which was dedicated to the Workman that built Rockefeller Center so there are a lot of Artists Incorporated in the complex working at the height of their powers these included of course Isa miniguchi Jose Maria seros Lee Laurie and Paul manship among others John D rockefeller's wife Abby was very passionate about art and pushed to incorporate it into the architecture of the Sun in fact she was also one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York Prometheus is apparently the most photographed public sculpture in New York City and it's also important as a symbol of art incorporated into the public sphere which is something that Rock Center has been dedicated to both historically but also in the present so the original idea behind the Rockefeller Center was a very Democratic one the idea was to create a set of Office Buildings that helped create a deeply Civic space so you see this in the vision for the center that JD Rockefeller and Abby Rockefeller had for the artwork that was to be incorporated into the architecture of the of the buildings [Music] the building behind me is Radio City Music Hall America's theater this was the first Building completed in Rockefeller Center Radio City Music Hall is kind of remarkable because it takes up an entire city block it's symmetrical and you would expect you know like most theaters the entrance would be on the middle right right down the center the original designers Edward Darrell Stone doing the architecture and Donald Dusky doing the design work they decided to put the entrance on the corner to draw the visitor not only to Radio City Music Hall but also into the Rock Center complex in general so when you're at Rockefeller Center in Christmas time you think of the Rockettes Radio City Music Hall was very much designed around the Rockettes the Rockettes were actually had a different home and they were brought here from that theater the impresario that brought us Radio City Music Hall SL rothafell no relation his nickname was actually Roxy and that's where the Rockettes got their name so there was a dance group that pre-existed the Rockettes but they got their name from Roxy Rockefeller Center is very much defined by a very heroic masculine architecture and what's sort of remarkable about the interior of Radio City Music Hall is it's very sexy and feminine and that comes outside a little bit in the Marquee you know the Marquee is characterized by this beautiful sweeping curve that wraps the corner and then of course the I think at the time fairly controversial 75-foot vertical sign so you'll notice that most of Rockefeller Center is limestone and bronze and glass here your stainless steel and aluminum have been used to distinguish it from the rest of the center and interestingly stainless steel and aluminum are very much the Hallmarks of the art deco style so Radio City Music Hall was completed in 1932 and the last rivet was placed just down the street in 1939 by John D Rockefeller the last rivet was a ceremonial christening if you will of the completion of the center and was actually driven in by John D himself and you can actually visit it there's a beautiful little people where you can look through a column and see it [Music] foreign we've made our way down to the lower level Concourse this lower level is not landmarked so over the years it had been renovated originally the Casual visitor couldn't have even stood here there was a restaurant in this location the restaurants removed across the corridor to give everyone access to the rink in the courtyard one of the tasks that we were given as a studio was to open it up it was very confusing down here originally the whole goal of the sunken Courtyard was to get access to the trains and transportation that's down here New Yorkers know it's really easy to get turned around when you're underground so part of our wayfinding effort was to embed and inlay the names of the various buildings within the terrazza one of the interesting things about art deco architecture and this context of the complex is Art Deco was all about this modern forward-thinking aesthetic that was very much rooted in skyscraper style this vertical character of the lines attenuation towards the sky but there's always this tension between the exterior architecture and the interiors that were found here which were very much based on the horizontal so we decided to Riff on the horizontal as a kind of wayfinding strategy and we established this idea which was common in many of the Interiors uh in the center including Radio City Music Hall is this idea of flow and enthusiasm for Speed and high-speed trains locomotives of the era during our initial site walkthroughs we discovered that the fountains above in the plaza were lined in glass block which allowed us to use them as skylights within the Concourse a forensic aesthetic approach drove all of our decision making so you can see from the biggest detail to the smallest detail every aspect of our thinking so here at the handle you see the ideas of stepping stepping of three flow in the handle and flutes the vertical flutes or this tension between the horizontal and the vertical there's this beautiful detail of the coping of the fountain under Prometheus of this curve that flows down to the lower level of the fountain that same curve was turned upside down to Define Behind The Cove that went throughout and even the light fixture over my shoulder and so the flow through the space was the most important thing connecting all the buildings in the complex at this lower level the terrazzo here is slightly lighter than in 30 Rock lightening the space [Music] [Applause] believe it or not we are standing on top of Radio City Music Hall and this is the secret that no one knows about it's hard to believe the complexity in putting a park on top of a roof and a roof that literally spans an entire block but here we are the fruition or the completion of JD rockefeller's dream of having parks on top of every setback within the complex and this one this particular park is dedicated to and used by the people that work in the center radio Park a half acre Park is one of the most recent projects completed here at Rockefeller Center but it's also a return to the original Vision which was a complex that would be covered in green roofs and Gardens some of the earliest plans for Rockefeller Center included parks on every one of the setbacks within the complex so this idea of a multi-layered development where you begin with the underground Transportation the plaza level and the retail and restaurants the office workers above and then rooftop gardens that's a very modern idea and part of the original Vision it's hard to imagine that we're standing literally on top of the world famous Radio City Music Hall stage the Radio City Music Hall Vault has these light coves that reach across the stage developed during the Heyday of transatlantic shipping and travel apparently the stage which is this beautiful Arc was inspired by the sunset over the Atlantic and that the Music Hall spans the entire block so that's a long span space and this is very heavy stuff all this dirt and trees so the complexity of building something like this on top of the roof is kind of a miracle building a park like this on a roof it's all about waterproofing you know your your roof at home leaks can you imagine this [Music]

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Keywords: adam rolston, arch digest, architectural digest, architectural digest walking tour, rock center new york, rockefeller center, rockefeller center christmas, rockefeller center christmas tree, rockefeller center history, rockefeller center holidays, rockefeller center ice skating, rockefeller center new york, rockefeller center new york christmas, rockefeller center rink, rockefeller center walking tour, rockefeller new york, rockefeller tour, walking tour

Id: tHB7SRK8_L4

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022