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New York - Rockefeller Center The nineteen commercial buildings buildings of Rockefeller Center constitute not only a vast skyscraper group but an organized city. Covering twelve land acres in the fashionable mid-town shopping district, the project includes a vast skyscraper office center, a shopping center, an exhibition center, and a radio and amusement center. The western front, along Sixth Avenue, is made up of buildings devoted primarily to entertainment: the former RKO Building and the adjoining Radio City Music Hall, the National Broadcasting Company's extension of the seventy-story RCA Building. The name "Radio City," which is often incorrectly applied to all of Rockefeller Center, properly designates only this western portion. Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com Sharing the eastern exposure, four lesser buildings serve as Fifth Avenue showcases for foreign nations: the British Empire Building, La Maison Française, the Palazzo d'Italia, and the International Building East. Slightly behind the latter two rises the forty-one-story International Building. In its architecture Rockefeller Center stands as distinctively for New York as the Louvre stands for Paris. Composed of the essential elements of New York skyscrapers -- steel framing and curtain walls, encasing elevators and offices -- the group relies for exterior decoration almost exclusively on the pattern of its windows, piers, spandrels, and wall surfaces. Its beauty derives from a significant play of forms, and light and shadow. Its character -- abrupt, stark, jagged, and powerful -- arises fundamentally from the spacing of the buildings, from their direct functionalism, their mass, their silhouette, and their grayish-tan color; not (as in the case of the buildings surrounding the nearby Grand Army Plaza) from ornamental roofs, reminiscent styles, or elaborate setbacks. The color tone of the Center is given by the warm tan limestone walls, the slate-gray cast aluminum spandrels under the windows, and especially by the light-blue window shades inside; the gray of the whole, blending into the surrounding atmosphere, adds to the apparent height of the group. Noteworthy is the integration of architecture with such "allied arts" as mural painting, sculpture, metal work, mosaic, wood veneering, and the like. Where individual skyscrapers in the past have boasted of employing a single painter and sculptor in addition to the architect to direct the work, Rockefeller Center gave employment to painters, sculptors, and decorators by whole groups and schools. The three architectural firms sharing equally the credit are Reinhard and Hofmeister; Corbett, Harrison, and MacMurray; and Hood and Fouilhoux. In terms of site planning, Rockefeller Center represents a complete departure from similar developments in New York and other large cities. It is the first group of tall buildings that does not simply face on the existing streets. Instead, the three blocks were freshly considered as a unit. The RCA Building, as the tallest, was placed close to the center of the plot. To reach it, a new private street, "Rockefeller Plaza," was established, running north and south between Forty-eight and Fifty-first Streets, and a pedestrian walk was cut through to Fifth Avenue. All the other chief buildings are staggered both as to height and location, in order to shade one another as little as possible and to build an interesting composition of forms. Two of the twelve acres of the Center's site are open areas. The tower-like shapes of such structures as the Empire State Building result from the application of setback regulations to buildings on relatively small plots; the large scope of the site planning of the Center, on the other hand, made possible the characteristically slab-like main buildings with long, narrow, and efficient floor areas, easily penetrated by sunlight and fresh air. The most impressive entrance to the Center is from Fifth Avenue through the Channel, a pedestrian passage 60 feet wide and 200 feet long that separates the British Empire Building from La Maison Française. Six shallow pools bordered with yew hedges, in the center of this esplanade, are fed by bronze fountainheads designed by Rene P. Chambellan to represent rollicking tritons and nereids. The Channel slopes from Fifth Avenue down to a flight of stone steps that lead to the lower plaza, eighteen feet below street level. The plaza, 125 feet long and 95 feet wide, may be flooded for winter ice skating, or embellished with hedges and flower beds for summer use as an outdoor café. Against its west wall, Paul Manship's huge bronze figure of Prometheus rises above spouting streams of water. Prometheus has been the target of caustic criticism; his detractors have nicknamed him "Leaping Looie." From the top of the stairway, walks diverge, following the rim of the lower plaza past a series of fountains set in greenery. to Rockefeller Plaza. Across this street is the entrance to the RCA Building. Several doorways leading from the lower plaza to an underground concourse'hint at Rockefeller Center's subterranean activity. A great underground shipping center and three-quarters of a mile of passages are entered through a 400-foot truck ramp just east of the Music Hall. A branch ramp turns off to a shipping room beneath the International Building, then enters the main truck area at a point directly beneath the lower plaza. The 850-foot RCA (Radio Corporation of America) Building, the central member of the group, is one of New York's tallest structures and, in gross area, the largest office building in the world. Its huge, broad, flat north and south façades, its almost unbroken mass, and its thinness are the features that impelled observers to nickname it the "Slab." The entrance is presided over by a rather astonishing bearded giant floating over a compass, in token of "the genius which interprets the laws and cycles of the cosmic forces of the universe to mankind." The side panels represent two of the "cosmic forces": Light and Sound. The whole was sculptured by Lee Lawrie. The screen below, with the appearance of crumpled cellophane, is made of square blocks of pyrex glass. The walls of the elevator banks in the middle of the two-story lobby are covered by large murals. Those on the south wall are by José Maria Sert and represent "man's intellectual mastery of the material universe"; they deal with the evolution of machinery, the eradication of disease, the abolition of slavery, and the suppression of war. Those on the north, by Frank Brangwyn, depict "man's conquest of the physical world," portraying respectively the cultivation of the soil, the development of machinery, and the hope of mankind's salvation -- the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. A mural, painted by Diego Rivera and originally in this lobby, caused an international controversy when the management first screened it and finally destroyed it, contending that the artist had departed from the approved preliminary sketch. Others held that the mural was destroyed because it included a likeness of Lenin. The case became a classic conflict between the artistic rights of a creator and the property rights of a purchaser. The space is now occupied by a Sert mural depicting the triumph of man's accomplishments through the union of physical and mental labor. The Museum of Science and Industry is entered from the lobby. The Sixth Avenue entrance to the RCA Building is surmounted by a glass mosaic by Barry Faulkner. Industriously assembled of about a million pieces of glass in 250 shades of color, it represents "thought enlightening the world." About thirty feet above the mosaic, in the spaces between windows, are four sculptured panels by Gaston Lachaise, American sculptor of the modern school. They are titled Genius Receiving the Light of the Sun, Conquest of Space, Gifts of Earth to Mankind, and Spirit of Progress. The most widely known tenants of the RCA Building are the National Broadcasting Company and its parent, the Radio Corporation of America. NBC's twenty-seven broadcasting studios, offices and other facilities occupy about four hundred thousand square feet of space on ten floors. These quarters, air-conditioned, sound-proofed, and equipped for television, are the home of WEAF and WJZ, the key stations of NBC's Red and Blue networks, respectively, and form the largest broadcasting establishment in the world. In the eastern end of the sixty-fifth floor is the Rainbow Room, a night club, where a color organ throws shifting patterns on a reflecting dome and a crystal chandelier over a revolving dance floor. The Rainbow Grill, at the western end of the same floor, is less formal in decoration and atmosphere. The seventieth-floor observatory promenade, 200 feet long and 20 feet wide, affords one of the finest views of New York. At the eleventh-floor level, directly over the NBC studios, is the largest of the seven roof gardens in the development. Visitors enter directly upon the International Rock Garden, where specimens from all over the world are arranged along a stream that cascades, winds, and twists for a distance of 125 feet along the terrace. There are a native American garden, with its old rail fence and shaded pool; typical Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, and aquatic gardens; and, perhaps the most successful of all, an English garden with a sundial from Donnington Castle and fine examples of yew planting. The majestic foyer, fifty feet high, sweeps to a grand stairway leading to three mezzanines. Brocatelle wall covering repeats the rich henna of Ezra Winter's large mural above the stairway. Gold wall mirrors extend from the floor to the gold-leaf ceiling. The spectacular modern auditorium contracts in a series of narrowing arches to the proscenium. Lights, hidden in the telescoped joints of these arches, can suffuse the great curved interior with glowing colors. The unusual excellence of the planning affords a pleasing and efficient arrangement of the seats. Three circular metal and enamel plaques, representing the Theater, Dance, and Song, designed by Hildreth Meiere and executed by Oscar Bach, are the only decorations on the long Fiftieth Street exterior wall of the Music Hall. The main entrance of the seven-story structure named La Maison Française carries a sculptured panel designed by Alfred Janniot in gold-leafed bronze. It greatly flatters its host city by representing Paris and New York joining hands over the figures of Poetry, Beauty, and Elegance. Three sculptured panels by Carl Paul Jennewein decorate the Fifth Avenue entrance of the virtually identical British Empire Building across the promenade, while above them is the British coat-of-arms. In the panels nine figures in gold leaf represent the major industries of the Empire. The north and south entrances bear panels designed by Lee Lawrie. The fgades of both La Maison Française and the British Empire Building are topped by carved limestone insets by Rene P. Chambellan. Rockefeller Center, New York City Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com Angels at Rockefeller Center Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com Night, Rockefeller Center, New York City Art Print Buy at AllPosters.com