Rockefeller Center is a remarkable and lasting achievement. It is monumental without the coldness of the International Style that would in the Sixties come to dominate architecture, much less the Brutalist Style that dominated the Eighties and Nineties, much less the grandiloquent style of the decades after that, or the present Postmodern style which has bits of buildings glued onto one another as if we were living in a humongous Dickens neighborhood. What is it that made Rockefeller Center such a wonderful thing? It was, I suggest, its formal features rather than its relation to the public, which was ballyhooed at the time by the claim that the Radio City Music Hall was a “palace for the people”.
A prime feature of Rockefeller Center, one that separated it from the Chrysler Building and other Art Deco masterpieces, was the deliberately different style of Art Moderne which downplays the use of ornamentation except for very dramatically placed touches. The Art Moderne Style of the Thirties through the Fifties should therefore not be reduced to the streamlining which is often used to define it, that consisting of the aerodynamic effect of rounded corners that marked the railroad trains at the time but also included the square and box-like appearance of buildings taken to be built in that style. Rather, what makes Rockefeller Center remarkable is that it combines sleekness with decoration, the buildings each themselves gracefully proportioned and having an almost medieval fortress look to their window sizes and spacing, while at the same time having a central piece of sculpture, which is there for the whole collection of buildings in the sculpture of Atlas above the skating rink, not itself a distinguished sculpture, though standing in place of what might have been a significant achievement, supplying only the sense, as a place marker, that something monumental and mythical was supposed to be there. Other statuary is used to mark the entrance way to buildings, such as a figure of Wisdom, which stands in front of the complex’s main building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Other buildings in the complex use other sculptural techniques to make their statement. The Radio City Music Hall uses its golden arched proscenium arch, something of a spectacular sunburst, in place of the cherubs that decorated the standard square proscenium arches that had been constructed all over the country during that golden age of movie house construction in the Twenties. The International Building in Rockefeller Center is even more innovative. It uses a bank of escalators to adorn its lobby so that traffic can get up to the operating floors easily while people in the lobby can look at the escalators as themselves objects of interest, sort of like gazing at Niagara Falls.
The architects made a number of choices that enhanced the interest of one or another part of the complex without resorting to much ornament. The not very high marquee of the Radio City Music Hall contrasts with the large and brassy marquee of the Roxy Theatre, which was set not many blocks away in its own Times Square milieu. To the contrary, the marquee at Radio City is narrow and can carry very limited text and ends protruding onto the sheer brick facade, many stories tall, that is one wall of the Music Hall. Very understated; very elegant. The Channel Gardens provide an entryway to the sunken skating rink and can be decorated for holidays but are too narrow to allow for crowds, which is what happens in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, or on the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, but is grand enough, despite its limited space between buildings, to allow it to be thought of, indeed, as the entry way for the entire complex. The well spaced but distinctively small windows of all the buildings are set off against their granite setting by having black but undecorated panels between the bottoms of each and the top of the next one down.
Looking at the evolution of the skyscraper in New York City during the first half of the Twentieth Century is instructive. The great Sullivan inspired skyscrapers of the first twenty years of the century were original in form in that the Flatiron building was of a triangular shape and the Woolworth Building was very tall, its tower set back from its base. Both buildings have sides that emphasize windows. Neither building, however, could bring itself to dispense with external decoration up and down their sides. That decoration assured that the buildings seemed solid rather than just curtain walls and so achieved a kind of elegance. By the Twenties, skyscrapers had done away with decoration. The New York Life Building was monumental in size but its clock tower was a throwback to turn of the century imagery and its color made the building look like a mausoleum. The same was true of the Williamsburg Bank Building, the tallest building in Brooklyn until recently, which was considered Byzantine revival and whose unimaginative top was criticized for looking like a phallus. In fact, both the New York Life Building and the Williamsburg Bank Building were monumental because they were adaptations of the Beaux Arts style that had been used fifteen years before in the Grand Central Terminal. This is most clear in the lower reaches of the two buildings rather than in their unimaginative tops. The Williamsburg has multistoried arched windows set in a granite facade that goes up ten stories or so and then begins the floor by floor windowed look, while New York Life has at its bottom a set of bays that confer on it its monumentality.
The skyscrapers of the early Thirties were quite different. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building abandoned yellow for gray as well as decoration and their bases were far narrower and yet the tall towers were still graceful, perhaps because, in addition to their well proportioned setbacks, they adopted the multiple window pattern from the ground floor all the way up to their towers, where the Chrysler Building had a multiple tiara look reminiscent of Art Deco while the Empire State Building, completed only months later, had its iconic mini tower of a cylinder, and so totally bereft of any symbolism other than this was an elegant way of having no meaning. Rockefeller Center, for its part, got rid of all pinnacles. Its architectural unity consisted, instead, only of the relative proportions of the heights of the buildings in combination with their similar designs. You don’t need a crown, which is to say, you don’t need a star on the top of the Charistmas tree. Now that is an aesthetic breakthrough.
Rockefeller Center, whose first building opened in 1933, was not a single building, a single skyscraper. In fact, the design of the community of buildings did not emphasize the tallest of them, 30 Rock, except as it played its part in the overall design, which was of a collection of buildings of different heights that matched one another in style and so presented a single aesthetic experience and so there are places within the complex where it can seem you are enclosed within the community of buildings, even though the complex is only some six square blocks, still a lot of midtown real estate to combine in a single package. Now what Rockefeller had done was to devote this space to commercial use, so that people had to travel to it and away from it to get to their homes, and so it wasn’t a true community, but a creation that provided a uniform architectural experience within New York City and so very different from Times Square, not so many blocks away, which also provides a distinctive experience but does so by allowing many competing venues-- restaurants, theatres, novelty shops-- to sit side by side, catch as can, due to the efforts of the free market in real estate, the whole enterprise tied together by its oversize billboards, nowadays digitalized and moving.
The precedent for Rockefeller Center was the design of utopian communities, including the Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv built in the Twenties that saw a uniform architecture as both comforting and clean, as a kind of campus from which one did not have to wander very far. New York City examples include Tudor City, built in 1927, as the first urban multistoried residential complex. It was a high tone and expensive version of the gigantic Parkchester built in the eastern Bronx by Metropolitan Life between 1939 and 1942 as a place for working class people. They would have boulevards where the shops had the same signage and shape as did all the residential buildings that made up the complex, though people did have to go outside the complex to work and do specialty shipping at major chain stores, however much there were enough shops within the complex to take care of daily needs. That drive to be self-sufficient and the failure to do so entirely is a characteristic of all of these utopian communities as well as of most campuses, where you leave so as to go to a restaurant or to town to shop, the “campus” of NYU singular in that there is no campus, just a lot of buildings of various ages that serve for classrooms and offices, Washington Square Park, which is a part of the city rather than the university, serving as its most prominent landmark, rather than a campanile or a library serving that function, which is what happens on most campuses. People can stay in Harvard Yard even if they do wander off to pick up a newspaper in Harvard Square.
It is worth noting that the Art Moderne style in architecture has held on. Consider the still only partially completed Hudson Yards, which groups its mixed commercial and residential skyscrapers around a single architectural thing. “The Vessel”, as it is called, is not a mythological reference but is a thing in itself, interactive in that visitors can climb into and up it, and so a reference to sculpture as an art form for its own sake, though ridding the overall project of such an entity would make it seem to lack something to pull the whole thing together, its shops and its buildings, something the architects of Rockefeller center fully understood.
Art Moderne, it should be noted, was not just a style in architecture. The combination of boldness, simplicity and single decoration was also the sense behind the fashions of the time. Whereas Thirties fashion had been dominated by narrow lines up and down a dress or a repeated pattern of small decorations, as with flowers, Forties fashion was dominated by broad bands of color and by, for example, a single flower appliqued upon a white blouse. Women’s shoes were larger and clunkier, supplying a more majestic though not a more powerful look.
What followed the Forties was a Modernism of just the sleek, streamlined variety that was supposed to characterize the previous two decades.The idea at Mid-Century was to cover up the innards of buildings, those consisting of pipes and electrical circuitry and machinery, with plain, painted and decoration less walls. Yes, there were some plants and fireplaces to give an indoor feeling, but the cutting edge was what was considered a Danish Modern look of angularity and boxlike construction, parts of which jutted out from the main box to provide the cantilevered look pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. It would take another few decades for that to be reversed so that the Pompidou Center in Paris parades out its pipes and other innards for a very different aesthetic experience than that which had been provided by Art Moderne, a style for the ages.