Word: rothafel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Music Hall had three sires--John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the world's richest man, whose eponymous Depression-defying venture in urban optimism was the greatest accomplishment of his life; S.L. ("Roxy") Rothafel, a monomaniacal showman whose idea of appropriate scale ranged from enormous to gargantuan; and Donald Deskey, a design buccaneer whose best-known work, eclipsing even the Music Hall, would be the Crest toothpaste tube. But what these three unlikely collaborators built, and what renovation architect Hugh Hardy and his colleagues at Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates have now reinvigorated, changed the course of American interior design...
...furniture pieces in novel forms and added new materials--tubular steel, Bakelite, aluminum foil--to the design vocabulary. Up to that point, the fashion in theater decoration might have been characterized as Italian Baroque Moorish Greek Renaissance Pagoda. Pick any two, and you had a movie palace. Deskey resisted Rothafel's bludgeoning insistence on "Portuguese Rococo" and instead dressed the place for Fred and Ginger, crafting a sleek temple dedicated not to Old World solemnity but to machine-age speed and sheen...