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Designer David Rockwell on “celebrating a sense of ritual”
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For 45 years, “Sunday Morning”‘s set, created by legendary CBS designer Victor Paganuzzi, has served as our backdrop. But for this year’s Design Issue, we opted for an update. And who better to reimagine our surroundings (in virtual form) than the eminent design firm Rockwell Group?
“There were things about the ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ piece that were an immediate yes for me,” said David Rockwell, the firm’s founder and president. “When I think of it, I think of it as one of the ultimate communal rituals. And every project we do is really about celebrating a sense of ritual.
“So, we started with lots of hand sketching. And as we zeroed in on it, I realized there was an opportunity to do something that had the kind of simplicity and restraint of the original, but have a kind of exuberance and theatrical flair,” he said.
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Rockwell knows theatrical flair; he designed Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, home of the Oscars since 2002.
GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP via Getty Images
His vast portfolio spans hotels, stadiums, stage sets, libraries, playgrounds, airport terminals, bars and restaurants – more than 500 restaurants – since founding the firm in 1984, 40 years ago.
Some Rockwell trademarks? Screens, vibrant and playful; stairs, sweeping and stately; and light, deep, warm, and rich.
Rockwell Group
Rockwell said, “My earliest thoughts about lighting in restaurants comes from candles and thinking about restaurants in Guadalajara, where I lived, where the candle was like a hearth. You can’t always replicate that, but it’s not a bad place to start.”
It’s not all glitzy restaurants and luxury hotels. This children’s hospital emphasizes color and imagination.
Rockwell Group
A temporary viewing platform at Ground Zero helped mourners grapple with the unthinkable in the months after 9/11. Rockwell said, “Really what was needed was a public viewing platform, so people could have this unmediated look at what really happened. That temporary structure was definitely one of the most powerful things I’ve ever been involved with.”
Rockwell’s firm, which started out with fewer than a dozen people, has grown to some 330, with outposts in L.A. and Madrid.
“I’m so grateful that I get to do what I do – I feel lucky every day,” he said.
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And today, “Sunday Morning” is the grateful beneficiary of their creativity.
Rockwell Group’s “CBS Sunday Morning” Project Description
Inspiration and Context
For the 2024 Design Issue, “CBS Sunday Morning”‘s annual broadcast of stories from different creative worlds, Rockwell Group wanted to welcome the program’s audience into an imagined world built from foundational elements of the show. “CBS Sunday Morning” and our studio share the belief that the audience is at the center of all we do, and we both use storytelling as a tool for connection.
Since its first broadcast in 1979, “CBS Sunday Morning” has been a weekly ritual for millions of people who find meaning not just in the day’s headlines, but also in the blueprints of culture laid out by contemporary architecture, performance, and the visual arts. This ritual has endured in large part thanks to “Sunday Morning”‘s original set design by legendary scenic designer Victor Paganuzzi, who laid the groundwork for a program that offered viewers solid ground and nuance for nearly five decades. Similarly for 40 years, Rockwell Group has created ritual experiences for people across all typologies – no matter the project, we approach everything from a theater design perspective, emphasizing narratives that speak to the human experience and make every audience feel considered.
The sun is “CBS Sunday Morning”‘s longstanding symbol; it fittingly represents the energy and insight it exchanges with its viewers. Over the years, more than 9,000 viewer-created suns have been used in the show – a testament to how the show resonates with viewers of all ages. They also reflect the belief that the ritual of making connects us across time and space. We are taking part in this tradition with our own sun, made in-house by a cross-disciplinary team.
Rockwell Group was initially inspired by the French curve – a form that combines the elegant and the practical, the emotional and the mathematical. French curves have been used for over a century in manual drafting and fashion design to draw smooth curves of various dimensions. From there we developed other concepts. Each sun has its own story and together this tapestry becomes the fundamental building blocks of our design.
Rockwell Group
Design Concept: Elements of Architecture
Our design speaks to the magazine and museum-like approach of “Sunday Morning,” and the exchange between the show – the world’s stories – and its viewers; the levels of depth and humanity that can be expressed through transparency and restraint; and the solid ground the show offers even when we feel chaos in the world. Our design is a journey through four forms which make up the foundation of architecture, built and detailed with artwork suns created by CBS viewers over the show’s history.
We created four design concepts for the show:
Planes and Screens: If the quickest path between two points is a straight line, the simplest architectural path is the plane, the flat or level surfaces, the crucial building block of any space. We explored the depth achieved through planes: walls, floors, and screens. Capturing light and casting shadows, these planes imbue a space with details and nuance that change over time as the sun moves. Our screens are delicately but unmistakably etched with a sun story, informed by the show’s history and its exchange with audiences.
Columns: The simple stacked arrangement of the column allows it to perform an essential task: bearing the load of a building. Over centuries columns and our use of them have evolved, creating restraints for designers that when embraced can become opportunities. Our columns are cut metal, illuminated from inside, to shine with the light of viewers’ submitted suns and artwork.
Domes: A curve which can support a structure or carve out space to draw the eye to the air beneath, domes have been used around the world to articulate how architecture can bend but not break – truth to the idea that good design ideas can withstand reality. Our dome, inspired by the Pantheon, includes an oculus to invite sunlight, with ornamentation surrounding the dome, and ground level, featuring suns by your audience.
Threshold: Thresholds anticipate a journey. They create an opportunity for depth, representing invitations to a new spaces, new worlds. Every ritual we design begins with that entry and invitation. Here you are welcomed to an ornamental tunnel, a network of suns brought together through simple elegance to achieve depth. At the end of the tunnel we have placed our contribution to the constellation of suns, a sun made of the French curve, combining the emotional and the mathematical.
Narrative and stories find their meaning in the arrangement: as the show progresses, the stories and suns build upon what came before. Like Gaudi’s nature-inspired approach to structure, our design facilitates dialogue between earth and sky, shadows cast in patterns of memory.
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For more info:
- Rockwell Group
- Photo credits: Peter Mauss, Frank Oudeman, AVABLU, Nikolas Koenig, Michael Kleinberg, Emily Andrews, Michael Stavaridis, Scott Frances, Eric Laignel, Jason Varney for Rockwell Group, Albert Vecerka & Blandon Belushin
Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: David Bhagat.
CBS News
Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
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When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
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