Rockefeller Center • New York City
R ockefeller Center began as a city-within-a-city to be built
Throughout the design process,
the Associated Architects
worked in reasonable harmony
in an office set up especially
for them in the nearby
Graybar Building. Although
Corbett, Reinhard, Hofmeister,
and Harrison all actively par-
ticipated, it was Raymond
Hood who at first took the
lead.
It was Hood who shaped the
massing of the RCA Building,
whose Daily News Building
provided the model for Radio
City’s elevations, who con-
vinced John R. Todd to clad the
buildings in limestone rather
than brick, to put a fountain in
the plaza and gardens on the
roof.
But, as L. Andrew Reinhard
pointed out, building the
Center was like building a
twentieth-century cathedral
town: “The architect is not one
man; the design is the result of
many minds working on the
same problem from many
angles. The results will be
attributable to the group, to the
‘guild of master builders’ if you
will. All are architects in the
sense that all contribute to the
creation and modification of
the final result.”1
around a new Metropolitan Opera House, the opera
having outgrown its quarters on 39th Street in Manhattan.
Benjamin Wistar Morris and Harvey Wiley Corbett—both
architects experienced in large-scale undertakings—drew up
grandiose schemes for the developers. However, among
other things, the Depression finally brought an end to the
opera project.
The withdrawal of the Opera House from the larger plan
threw everything into turmoil. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., by
then the major investor, recalled the moment bitterly:
“Thus it came about that in the early fall of 1930, with
the depression under way and values falling rapidly, I
found myself committed to Columbia [University] for a
long lease, wholly without the support of the enterprise
by which and around which the development had
been planned.”2
With the general financial climate steadily worsening,
there wasn’t even the possibility of subletting a portion of the
site in its unimproved state. It was clear that the choices were
to either abandon the entire development, or, as Rockefeller
later put it, “to go forward with it in the definite knowledge
that I myself would have to build and finance it alone, with-
out the immense impetus that the new opera house would
have given, and with no escape from the fact that under the
changed conditions it would be necessary to improve all the
lot in order to lease it, thus involving immense capital out-
lays never contemplated. I chose the latter course.”3
This was the beginning of the Rockefeller Center we see
above from left to right: Hood, Harrison, and Reinhard inspect a model, c.1931
opposite: The roof-top gardens today are not open to the general public.
Never fully realized, the grand scheme was gloriously described in the October 1931 issue
of ARCHITECTURAL RECORD as the “HANGING GARDENS OF RADIO CITY—The roof terraces . . .
will be landscaped with pools, fountains, tiled paths, flower mosaics, trees and shrubs.”

Imagining a Better Future
In the early 1930s, in response to the
success of the darker German film
METROPOLIS (1927), a spate of American
films, presented Depression-plagued
audiences with a more confident, opti-
mistic view of the future.
In JUST IMAGINE (above), New York
City is depicted 50 years into the future
with an entirely changed skyline. There
are nine levels of traffic, private air-
planes for everyone, and a number of
surprising amenities—television, pills for
nourishment, and rocket travel to Mars.
Filmed when the celebrated architec-
tural delineator Hugh Ferriss had just
published his influential visionary draw-
ings under the title THE METROPOLIS OF
TOMORROW, the film’s sets clearly refer
to his compelling vision. Two-hundred-
story-high skyscrapers are set back to let
light into the canyons between them; dif-
ferent traffic levels are well ordered;
buildings gleam with electric light. The
architecture presents an image of a
healthy, prosperous, and enjoyable
future.
The setback regulation of the New
York Zoning Law of 1916, which began
to transform architecture in the United
States during the 1920s, had been
enthusiastically welcomed as the advent
of a specifically American form of archi-
tectural modernism [page 144]. “What
we are getting now is something utterly
new and distinctive,” Harvey Wiley
Corbett wrote in 1923.
“And its effect will be felt on the archi-
tecture of the whole world. The set-
back style will go down in history
along with the Gothic, the Classical
and the Renaissance. . . . The new
type of the city with its innumerable
spires, towers and domes, set back
from the cornice line, will provide a
fascinating vision. All the novelty in
the world brought under a larger
scheme.”4
today. L. Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister are gener-
ally credited with its basic scheme, with Raymond Hood
contributing significantly to the design of the main buildings.
Together with Corbett and four others, they called them-
selves the Associated Architects.
They worked exceedingly well together. Hood was a kind
of team leader, but went to great lengths to downplay the
role of any individual participant. In 1932 he noted that,
" . . . it would be impossible to estimate the number of
official minds that have engaged in untangling the
complexities of the problem; and certainly the number
of unofficial minds that have pondered over it is an
even more meaningless guess.”5
The design process underwent constant revision as one
visionary scheme after another was put to the test of eco-
nomic viability.
"Architects, builders, engineers, real estate experts, fin-
anciers, lawyers," Hood wrote, "all have contributed
something from their experience and even from their
imagination."6
Raymond Hood was certainly happier to be designing a
purely commercial project. One of Hood’s draftsmen drew
up at least eight different super-block schemes that included
the entire three-block site. Most were variations of the “City
under a Single Roof,” a project for an idealized Manhattan
that Hood had conceived earlier. The “Loft and Office
Scheme,“ for instance, proposed second-story pedestrian
walkways on each block ringing three massive loft buildings.
Rising above the lofts on the middle block was a long thin
slab crowned by a central tower, while smaller transverse
slabs bridged the side streets. Hood also presented a more
personal conception: low, square blocks at the four corners
of the site were isolated by private streets. Forty-ninth and
Fiftieth streets changed their courses to meet in a cross-
shaped intersection at a tiny “Rockefeller Square.” Four tow-
ers faced one another across the square, their masses step-
above: New York in 1980 as envisioned in the futuristic musical JUST IMAGINE, Fox, 1930.
Architectural references in the film include skyscraper bridges designed by Raymond Hood in
1929, the recently completed, setback Chrysler Building and Bank of Manhattan (1929), as
well as the Empire State Building, which was nearing completion in 1930.
ping down in radiating diagonals toward the edge of the site.
In spite of all the alterations that took place over the many
months that followed, most of this early thinking found its
way into the final project.
Talks had begun with General Electric, the parent compa-
ny of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) whose affili-
ates included the National Broadcasting Company (NBC)
and the Radio-Kelth-Orpheum (RKO) theater chain.
Reinhard & Hofmeister drew up a new conception of the
project, a design intended to lure the prospective tenants by
offering them a prominent, centrally located office structure
—the present RCA Building.
The complex was to be called Radio City. The involvement
of the entertainment industry, and the opportunity to do
something monumental, provoked another outburst of artis-
tic passion, as Hood and Corbett sought to inject a greater
degree of unity into the isolated blocks. They came up with
a proposal to stretch a vast enclosed promenade across the
entire width of the site, and 49th and 50th streets would dip
below grade. This forum would serve as a grand lobby for up
to five separate theaters and for the RKO and RCA office

rockefeller center
buildings. The drama each night would be played out on a
stage of hitherto unimagined scale. The scheme was costly
and raised the danger that, if one element of the composition
failed, the entire development would be jeopardized.
As a group of buildings the Center heralded a whole new
concept of coordinated city development: each building
working with the others and all with the street. In the end,

21
even one of the buildings was turned to cast less of a shad-
ow over the plaza. An underground pedestrian concourse—
which boasts over two hundred shops and restaurants—ties
the entire complex together.
The slab form and setbacks of the RCA Building give it its
distinctive character. Setbacks were, of course, required
under the Zoning Law of 1916 (page 180), but the slender
structure and the open space in front of it exempted it from
the law. In the case of the RCA Building, the setbacks per-
form a practical purpose. In tall buildings all elevators don’t
top: Lee Lawrie's Atlas, unveiled in 1936, stands in front of the International Building.
above: The Channel Gardens at Christmas.
above, right: Lawrie's relief, “Wisdom: the Voice From the Clouds,” embarrassed Nelson
Rockefeller when he learned it was based on William Blake's drawing of “The Creator.”
right: An entrance to the underground pedestrian concourse.
A Slab of Rugged Honesty
Raymond Hood felt that 20th Century
building technology had made for “an
architecture of plain surfaces, with slight
ornamentation, the decorative effects
being obtained almost wholly by the
. . . color, texture and the contrast of
materials. . . . Stone in slab form, for
example, direct from the saws with solid
masonry and carving reduced almost to
the vanishing point, is the logical,
durable and beautiful material for the
exterior.”7
To Raymond Hood, the RCA Building
was a true skyscraper, but “it does not
ape the aristocratic silhouettes of the
past. It comes by its own form honestly
and is not ashamed of it. First there is its
spinal column, the vertical elevator and
utility system, planned as simply and
dlrectly as we know how to plan them.
Then about this spinal column is
wrapped uniform office space of the
proper depth with the exterior wall
pierced by windows four and one half
feet wide, every nine feet. With the
successive stopping off of the elevator
banks to the lower floors, the sides are
set in to eliminate the dark useless
space that would other-wise be created.
So the tall, thin slab with its giant steps
on the side is a true expression of the
problem. It may not be orthodox beauty
according to some standards but it has
a rugged honesty that is akin to
beauty."
serve all floors; they are built in banks that only ascend to a
particular level. In this case, the setbacks actually mark the
floors where the elevators change. Raymond Hood was
determined that no office worker would sit more than 27 feet
from a window. In the RCA Building the elevators are locat-
ed in the middle of the structure, meaning that once an ele-
vator bank terminates, that area becomes empty space in all
the floors above. And because that space is in the center of
the structure, a desk located where the elevators would have
been would be more than 27 feet from the edge. The solu-
tion is to shrink the envelope of the building as it goes up.
Not only is that a good thing for light-starved office workers,
but it makes the space very valuable, allowing the manage-
ment to charge premium rents. Through his setbacks, Hood
found a way to simultaneously assure architectural beauty,
worker satisfaction, and a good return on Rockefeller’s
investment.
The significance of Hood's bold massing was misunder-
stood and sharply criticized. Rockefeller himself disliked the
expansive side views. In fact the entire project drew negative
criticism—from its inception to its completion and
beyond—for at least the first few years. Given the magnitude
of the Center’s ultimate appeal for tourists world-wide, it is
hard to believe now that this could have been so.
Ralph Adams Cram, still building the gothic Cathedral of
St. John the Divine uptown, likened the buildings to "quad-
rangutar prisms, casually disposed, towering incontinently
and sliced off at a certain height, not for any considerations
of design or proportion but, perhaps—there is no other rea-
son—because the stock of modeling clay gave out."8
Lewis Mumford, who harshly criticized the project all
along, said, “The opportunity has been wantonly wasted . . .
This is the sorriest failure of imagination and intelligence in
modern American architecture. If Radio City is the best our
architects can do with freedom, they deserve to remain in
chains.”9
When the French architect Le Corbusier visited New York
City in November of 1935 he was taken to the Rockefeller
left: Wenrich’s drawing looks South with the Empire State Building to the left.
“In the development of the walls and surfaces that clothe the buildings,” said
Hood, “our twentieth century industry has had an immense influence. Materials
have been sought whose durability, quality of surface and ease of manufacture
and application preeminently fitted them for the places where they were to go.”10
Center complex. The New York Times reported that “the
modern architect was not particularly impressed. He was
looking for architecture not theater . . . the city that is a
machine for living in—not merely frightfully expensive
scenery built to knock the beholder’s eyes out.”11
The plaza was particularly slow to become the attraction it
is today. Originally, it was a dreary, purposeless place that
few seemed attracted to. “The public,” wrote Talbot Hamlin
in the New York Times,
“had been led to expect a superb piece of town beau-
tification, carefully thought out. They received only
another real estate promotion, high class, to be sure,
but a monument not to city beautification or city pride,
but to the hope of profits. The general plan was a real
estate promoter’s plan; and however beautiful the
detail, it is the general plan that controls effects. The
much heralded plaza at the center turned out to be an
insignificant open space completely dwarfed by the
60[sic]-story cliff of building at whose feet it is
placed.”12
Expressionist Sunrise
Ironically, designs for the ill-fated
1927 Metropolitan Opera House, by
the Viennese architect Joseph Urban,
resurfaced as partial inspiration for
Radio City Music Hall.
The Music Hall also used a number
of features Urban described in his
1929 book, Theaters. It was to be
egg-shaped, with an acoustical plas-
ter ceiling, such as Urban had recent-
ly built at the New School (below).
Balconies were to be shallow and
pushed to the back of the room, while
the stage was to thrust out along the
sides of the auditorium, a further
development of Urban's vignette
stages.
The Associated Architects’ first mod-

rockefeller center
How did all this turn around? Tastes do change (note the els followed the Urban design more
explicitly: the smoothly curving ceiling
taste in question belongs to critics and other architects), but punctured by a coffer-like pattern of
it’s not enough to say that we simply grow used to things. grilles and the semicircular prosceni-
um was a strangely streamlined inter-
The raw material was always there; well designed structures, pretation of the auditorium in his
and particularly well designed urban spaces. The Channel Scheme IX for the Metropolitan
Gardens invite people in, the RCA Building is a pivot, and Opera. The final design merged the
curving ceiling with the transverse
the reconfigured streets move them along naturally, comfort- bands of Urban's Music Center.

23
ably, and with pleasure. Once people began to use it, they But, in the end it was the gilded
vaults of the Music Hall that were
did the rest. most unique and impressive, turning
The blocks that stretch from Fifth to Sixth Avenues in the stage into a metaphorical sunrise.
Manhattan are particularly long. Since little ..Showman that he was,
the hall's impresario,
of interest breaks up the walk from one Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel,
avenue to the other, the trip can often seem claimed it had been his
inspiration:
tedious. As Jane Jacobs aptly points out, "I didn't conceive the
long blocks keep people from forming “rea- idea. I dreamt it, I believe
sonably intricate pools of city cross-use.” It in creative dreams. The
picture of Radio City was
is her contention that “. . . if city mixtures of complete and practically
perfect in my mind before
above: Radio City Music Hall, Associated Architects, 1932. artists and architects put
Donald Deskey, chosen in a competition, decorated the interiors. pen to drawing paper."

right: Auditorium under construction, The New School for

Social Research, New York City, Joseph Urban, architect, c.1930.

The Gardens of “New Babylon”
Looking over the city during a meeting
one day, Hood said, "Look at all those
roofs down there cluttered with bulk-
heads, ventilators, chimneys, elevator
penthouses, water tanks and God
knows what else. I was wondering if
office space that looked out on a gar-
den would be worth any more."
Hood was aware that the project
began as a grand opera square and
had upset the community by turning into
Radio City. He declared, by virtue of the
gardens, "John D. Rockefeller, Jr., will
. . . make amends for not creating a
classical setting for a Roman Holiday in
the busiest part of Fifth Avenue."
At first Hood envisioned a continuous
sequence of rooftop terraces (above)
linked by bridges that soared high
across the streets, evoking what he
called the "fabled living tapestry of the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon."
While the bridges were
quickly eliminated from the
plan, four gardens were
constructed between 1933
and 1936 on the buildings
facing Fifth Avenue, and
more were located on the
third- and eleventh-story set-
backs of the RCA building.
Though they were consider-
ably diminished versions of
Hood's original vision, they
nonetheless provided the center
with almost two acres of green-
ery, much of which was opened
to the public during the Center's
first years of operation.
use are to be more than a fiction on maps, they must result
in different people, bent on different purposes, appearing at
different times, but using the same streets.”18 By way of con-
trast to the existing condition, she notes that the Rockefeller
Center project transformed “stagnation” into “fluidity of use”
with the addition of an extra cross street. Jacobs felt this to
be the salient feature of Rockefeller Plaza:
“The most artful design in other respects could not tie
[the Center] together, because it is fluidity of use, and
the mixing of paths, not homogeneity of architecture,
that ties together city neighborhoods into pools of city
use, whether those neighborhoods are predominantly
for work or predominantly for residence.”13
Fluidity of use certainly makes the promenade an exem-
plary focal point in the urban fabric. For a city to be coher-
ent to its inhabitants and visitors, it needs certain reference
points which shape the neighborhoods and mark one’s
progress around the town. A single tower may suffice, but a
clearly definable group of buildings, distinct from their
neighbors, but not totally different from them, will provide
orientation for a far larger area.
The promenade is a place to meet friends or for sitting
beside some of the few ornamental plants in the area. People
come to watch the ice skaters, watch performers, or listen to
free concerts. They browse in shops that sell exotic and more
costly products than those offered in the average New York
neighborhood. Rockefeller Center offers accessible, open
public space; cafés, restaurants and theaters;
a skating rink and dance floors. It maintains
gleaming lobbies and clean public rest-
rooms, and provides sheltered underground
streets which many people use to avoid
crowds and inclement weather. Through
careful planning and constant attention to
its public image, it has fashioned itself into
a busy center for many kinds of activity,
not simply of office work and entertain-
above: The earliest garden schemes were superbly depicted
by John Wenrich, the delineator for the Associated Architects.
left: One of Wenrich’s drawings showing the “Venetian”
bridges that connect the roof-gardens was turned into a
popular postcard before the project was even built.
ment. As such, it draws visitors and local people and
provides them with an orientation point, a stopping
place within a city that was designed to fit an other-
wise monotonous grid.
Rockefeller Center is a veritable mecca for tourists,
especially during the holiday season. For many the
Center conjures up iconic images that are synony-
mous with Christmas. If they can’t see it in person,
people world-wide will watch the tree-lighting cere-
mony via television. And, of course, there are the pop-
ular seasonal pageants at Radio City Music Hall.
Though founded on the bedrock of traditional com-
position, Rockefeller Center was the first building
complex to use the skyscraper not merely as a com-
mercial accommodation, no matter how artistically
expressed, but as an integral element of a complex
urbanism.
The Swiss architectural historian and apologist for
modernism Sigfried Giedion prophetically hailed “the
new scale of Rockefeller Center, which coincides with
the scale of modern bridges and parkways. . . .
Rockefeller Center simply is in advance of its period in
the urban scale. What must change is not the Center
but New York itself. The city must adopt the new scale
which is identical with that of its bridges and park-
ways. Until then it will stand as a reminder that the
structure of the city must be transformed, not in the
interest of single individuals but for the sake of the
community as a whole.”14
And, in the end, though he was still critical of much
about the complex, even Lewis Mumford had to
agree that “ . . . none of these things
shows from the outside, externally the
Center is a serene eyeful."15
The Associated Architects eminently
succeeded in building their city-within-a-
city and gave New York, and indeed the
world, a lasting legacy.
right: A children’s book from1954.
When asked to sell his tree Mr. Judson tells his little girl,
“Just think, Ellen. More than a million people
will see your tree at Rockefeller Center.
Nearly fifty million people will see it on television.”
The Most Famous Tree in the World
In its original form, the plaza was a failure.
The statue of Prometheus by Paul Manship
was universally criticized; the Federal
Writers’ Project reported that it had been
nicknamed “Leaping Looie.” Manship him-
self was disappointed by the statue, explain-
ing that because of the tight construction
schedule and an inadequate budget, he had
not been allowed to erect a full-scale plaster
model on the site. He felt that “the group
. . . tends to sink and flatten the Plaza,
instead of lifting it up, blending it in with the
general architectural scheme.”
The original plaza was rather bleak and
unadorned. Small shop windows and sober
signage were not enough to lure pedestri-
ans. But, over the next few years the plaza
rockefeller center
was gradually transformed. In 1934 the City
Garden Club was invited to mount an exhi-
bition, and its floral displays succeeded in
bringing the romance of the roof gardens
down to the ground. In the following year
the shops were transformed into restaurants,
and the stone walls of the plaza were pulled
down to make way for huge sheets of plate
glass. The restaurant owners commissioned
James Thurber and William Steig to draw
25
cartoons on the walls. In summertime café
tables and trees filled the plaza. There was
still the problem of how to animate the
space in the winter. It was not
until 1936 that a brilliant
solution was found in the
form of an ice-skating rink.
The plaza and its double
ring of promenades— one
at street level, one sunk to
the level of the Channel
Gardens—had at last
found their proper role as
an open-air urban theater.
The photo above shows
the rink’s inauguration on
Christmas day 1936.