Q&A: David Rockwell

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ABOUT 200 HALF-CRAZY PEOPLE bumping into each other amid a riot of toys, props, ethno artifacts, fabric swatches and small dogs — Rockwell's New York architecture studios are like an opera buffa backstage. This is the provenance of the zillion glass beads Rockwell hung in a Mohegan casino, the hundreds of snow globes he installed in a restaurant bathroom, the stage designs of the musicals "Hairspray" and the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and the production design of "Team America: World Police," among other projects.

Rockwell, who speaks on Thursday at the National Building Museum, has a new book, "Spectacle" (Phaidon). It packages not pictures of his design work but his obsession with mass gatherings such as the Kumbh Mela cleansing ritual on the banks of the Ganges, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert and, of course, Carnival.

» EXPRESS: The book makes total sense because you've always seemed as much a showman as an architect.
» ROCKWELL: The book started out as a conversation I had with Phaidon about theater and the audience/performer relationship. I started to research what happens with events that had fascinated me ever since I was a kid. I had been to an awful lot of events since my journey from the private suburbs of New Jersey to the very public markets of Mexico [where his family moved]. I've always been interested in the rituals that connected all these various spaces. More than any one building, I was always interested in the lives within the building.

» EXPRESS: The art critic Dave Hickey mentions the "puritanical ugliness" Americans seem content to live with. Why might we be "addicted to solemnity," as he says?
» ROCKWELL: He lives in Las Vegas, where the promise is more interesting than the reality. But we lead programmed lives, and that kind of cathartic release you find in Vegas connects us with something bigger than ourselves.

» EXPRESS: Not everything in the book is in riotous motion; the Brussels Flower Carpet is laid out in a rather staid city square.
» ROCKWELL: People have an inherent need to look at the extraordinary excess of something like the Brussels Flower Carpet. It's good that the sober part — the square — is the permanent part, and the exuberant part is temporary.

» EXPRESS: It's a far cry from the Tomatina Festival in Spain, where 30,000 people writhe half-naked in 140 tons of ripe tomatoes.
» ROCKWELL: I think I'm in the post-tomato phase of my life. But that's about putting yourself where you're not in control, and to get past your fears and participate is terrifying and thrilling.

» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; Thu., 6:30-8 p.m., $12-$20; 202-272-2448, nbm.org. (Judiciary Square)

By Bradford McKee for Express
Photo by Steve McCurry for Magnum Photos via Phaidon Press