CLIENT Elektra Entertainment Time Warner   LOCATION Rockefeller Center New York, New York COST Construction: $2.5 Million USD Furniture: $1.0 Million USD
		DESCRIPTION The corporate headquarters of Elektra Entertainment Group, an internationally renowned contemporary music label, is located on the twelfth through eighteenth floors of 75 Rockefeller Center in New York City. The conceptual program for the project addresses the inherent tension between the iconoclastic artist and a corporate entity. Potential conflicts are posed and reconciled by harmonizing the handmade with the machine-tooled, the circle with the grid, and the individual's creative freedom with the collective needs of the company. Like Elektra's youthful audience and personnel, the space would be open, flexible and surprising. The plan is organized around a datum, or horizon line, demarcated primarily by a horizontal band of wood paneling that runs at hand-height through the length of the space, starting at the elevators and terminating at a view of the Empire State Building directly outside a centrally located window. Semi-private workstations and freestanding storage units are arrayed around the datum in a wide corridor encircling the central core of the building. A row of private offices line the building's perimeter, punctuated in two locations where windows pour natural light into the workstations and corridor. The interior's main structural organization takes the form of a suspended steel grid that defines the glass curtain walls, the workstations, the storage units, and reception area staircase. The surfaces of the walls are clad in stained wood panels, primarily chrome-green, that add a verdant lushness to the geometric grid. The scale of the panels, and of the leather and sisal floor tiles, are calibrated to the human body - the reach of the hand, the stride of the foot - which lends the space an air of intimacy and personalization. The human dimension is defined by hand-painted frescos that punctuate the workstations, meeting rooms and private offices. The texture and coloration of the frescos' intersecting geometric contours define the space even further and underscore the contribution of individual creativity to the collective well-being. These three elements - the steel skeleton, the wood panels and the plaster frescos - are repeated and recombined in every aspect of the interior, comprising an organic system of telescoping detail in which the smallest detail informs the largest order. The reception area stair, like the storage units, is suspended on vertical tubing, and stabilized by steel angles anchored to the side walls. Saturated red leather floor tiles travel up the stairs in a syncopated rhythm on black steel risers, interrupted by a natural wood plinth two steps above the red leather landing. Two sets of handrails, one blackened and waxed steel and the other stainless, echo the upward lift. On the sixteenth floor, the staircase joins the horizontal band of wood paneling and sets up a spatial axis that leads through a glass curtain entrance wall toward a small, perfectly cylindrical meeting room in which all three elements - steel, wood and plaster - come into play. The room is entered through sliding pocket doors made of wood panels and plaster frescos on a steel frame. A second pair of arced frescos, acting as movable wall panels for the audio-visual equipment set into the stained-wood walls, glides along an exposed steel track. The wood panels cover acoustical batting designed to prevent echoes. Opposite the doorway, a single, deep-silled window perfectly frames the profile of the Empire State Building. An oval-shaped meeting room lies on the floor directly below the cylindrical room. The broad flanks of the ellipse contain three windows on one side and three video monitors on the other. The monitors hang on a steel skeleton in front of stained wood panels. Frescos define the ellipse's narrow ends, and a custom-designed copper oval table occupies the room's center.