CLIENT Warner Bros. Records Time Warner   LOCATION Rockefeller Center New York, New York COST Construction: $1.5 Million USD Furniture: $1.0 Million USD
		DESCRIPTION The legacy of Warner Bros. Records mirrors the history of postwar American popular music. The conceptual program for the interiors of the company's New York headquarters celebrates the creative individual within a corporate hierarchy devoted to the art and science of recording. The New York headquarters of Warner Bros. Records, located on the twentieth and twenty-first floors of 75 Rockefeller Center, encompasses ten thousand square feet on each floor. The client's program required a hierarchical arrangement of offices as well as video viewing rooms, music listening rooms and conference rooms. A substantial amount of storage space and prominent racks for product display were also needed. The space's architectural narrative begins on the twentieth floor, in the centrally located lobby, where the two side walls adjacent to the elevator banks disappear into structural glass curtains penetrated by glazed double doors. Behind one pair of doors, a freestanding sculptural collage entitled Edison's Apparition, which evokes the various media used by Thomas A. Edison to capture and play back sound, signals the genesis of the recording industry as well as the starting point for the synthetic horizon that bisects and organizes the space. The synthetic horizon, or datum, travels from Edison's Apparition through the second pair of doors and widens into a reception area dominated by a double-height translucent glass wall, through which diffuse light enfolds the space from unseen windows on two floors. The reception area's irregularly-shaped Pakistani slate floor tiles follow the axis of light toward a bronze staircase. The floor rises two steps to meet the staircase, which is turned at right angles to the entranceway. Floating in silhouette before the luminous translucent glass wall, the stair hangs in suspension from bulkheads in the ceiling. Its structural components ­ custom-engineered risers and vertical support bars ­ interlock with remarkable solidity. Vertical bronze mesh safety barriers and a pair of polished bronze handrails undulating in a sine/cosine arrangement accentuate the lightness and upward movement of the stair. The perimeter offices that surround the double-height reception area are clad in wood panels stained aubergine and secured by bronze allen screws. The office doors are flush to the wall, their presence indicated only by their bronze circular latches. The interplay of the panels' gridlike pattern with the organic randomness of the wood grain metaphorically evokes the complex relationship between the creative individual and the corporate hierarchy. The artist or scientist pushes established boundaries with enlivening doses of imaginative chaos, while the corporation provides structure, stability and practiced methods of introducing an individual's creativity to the world. Semi-private workstations are located along the public circulation route around the perimeter offices. In the same area, the contributions of the musicians and recording engineers represented by Warner Bros. Records are celebrated by CD displays composed of vertical bronze planes sandwiched between two aubergine-stained panels. The wood panels swivel open on bronze poles anchored to the walls surrounding the building's inner core. The display racks, set beside painted steel storage units housing corporate files and audio-visual materials, create a series of layered planes perpendicular to the synthetic horizon, helping to produce an illusion of expanded space along the public corridor.