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Ryongyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Courtesy of Ap/Wide World Photos) |
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| Once a world's fair folly, the revolving restaurant took over
the country and then the world, becoming a gently turning symbol
of optimism and progress. by Tom Vanderbilt Architecture or revolution. I am reminded of Le Corbusier's declaration as I sit in The View, the revolving restaurant atop the Marriot Marquis hotel in New York's Times Square. On one side the $12.95 all-you-can-eat buffet glides by; on the other, a shimmering twilight vista stretches into New Jersey. Revolutions come once an hour here--but can this bricolage of chrome, airport-lounge carpeting, stucco, and maroon Naugahyde cushions, where all emphasis is on looking away from the building, really be architecture? John Portman, the architect-developer who designed the Marquis and many other hotels crowned with revolving restaurants, once said (after Goethe), "I consider architecture frozen music." Sitting here, though, I feel a certain glacial dissipation, as if the building were slowly melting in time with the ice in the blue drinks, or at least with the Rupert Holmes song playing overhead. The revolving restaurant is an American idea that conquered the world. What began as an architectural folly for the 1962 World's Fair has spread to almost every corner of the globe, atop broadcast towers like the Space Needle and crowning modern glass-and-steel hotels. As the long postwar boom of American-led trade and tourism marched on through the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, these spinning dining rooms became symbols of optimism, progress, and success. Yet Americans have cooled to the dynamic dining they helped popularize. Some revolving restaurants have simply stopped rotating, others have been refurbished into conference centers; their novelty has long been supplanted by Rainforest Cafés, IMAX theaters, and corporate skyboxes. Only one revolving restaurant--the Stratosphere in Las Vegas--has been built in the U.S. this decade, and even that has to compete with a roller coaster perched atop it and a casino at its base. To begin to understand their appeal, one must now look to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where the revolving restaurant is still seen as a sign of progress--an emblem of prosperity, not kitsch. Indeed, they have become more indicators of economic development than adornments to the skyline. During the 1990s, a new wave of revolving restaurants swept around the world, from Lebanon to Jakarta to Cairo; often, their openings occasioned visits by heads of state and much adulatory press. (The restaurant atop the 674-foot Saddam Tower in Baghdad may be the only one actually named for a head of state.) When the Forte Grand Hotel opened in Abu Dhabi in 1993, Gulf Construction magazine enthused that "the crowning glory of the hotel is the rooftop revolving restaurant, a masterpiece of modern technology." As Bangkok, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian cities became economic powerhouses in the last two decades, they bloomed with skyscraping hotels, which, as Portman and Hyatt proved here in the 1970s and 1980s, were not complete without a slowly revolving dining attraction at their summit. Now, with the region's euphoria undone by a series of financial crises, those revolving restaurants are not only a reminder of the recent boom, but are taken as a sign that all is not lost. An ad for Malaysia in the business press shows the 1,381-foot Menara Kuala Lumpur tower (capped with the Seri Angkasa restaurant) and declares: "Why the dark clouds of economic uncertainty will soon blow over." In North Korea, the government funneled scarce resources into the pyramidal Ryugyong Hotel, which has a (soon to be) revolving restaurant crowning its 105 stories. (The hotel, still unfinished, awaits Pyongyang's tourist boom.) In China, a spate of building in the 1980s prompted a cautionary note in the People's Daily: "After Canton's Flower Garden Hotel built its revolving restaurant, every other place followed the same example and paid no attention to actual conditions and requirements." The idea of dinner accompanied by a high-altitude view dates back at least to the Eiffel Tower, which has had a restaurant at its second "platform" since it opened in 1889. The notion of sedentary consumers taking in a mechanized 360-degree view of their environment is also a nineteenth-century creation: at panoramas, people sat in circular theaters and watched as painted scenery of London or Paris passed before their eyes. This century gradually brought the technological advances that would make possible the Space Needle, the Marquis, and the Stratosphere. Visitors to the 1939 New York World's Fair were transported by the automated "helicline" walkway into the dome-like Perisphere, and then were rotated around the model "Democracity" on an outer revolving ring. By the late Fifties, revolving stages were common in film and theatrical productions, while the wonders of Detroit whirled slowly on auto show platforms. At about the same time, television broadcast towers began to rise around the world. In 1957, Fritz Leonhardt designed the 445-foot Stuttgart TV tower; at its pinnacle was a cylindrical (non-revolving) restaurant that drew nearly a million visitors its first year. In 1961 John Graham, a Seattle architect, acolyte of Buckminster Fuller, and early shopping mall pioneer, built the very first revolving restaurant, La Ronde, atop an office building at the Ala Moana Shopping Center in Ho-nolulu. A year later, he was commissioned to design the Space Needle for the Seattle World's Fair. Shown a postcard of the Stuttgart television tower and a rough sketch of the proposed Seattle tower, Graham was reportedly immediately inspired: "Let's make the restaurant revolve." If the Otis Elevator was the Eiffel Tower's technological showpiece, then the Eye of the Needle--which usually gets the credit as the world's first revolving restaurant, in spite of La Ronde--was the Space Needle's crowning achievement. A Graham press release noted that in pre-installation tests, the turntable--which weighed 90 tons yet could be pushed by hand--was vibration-free: "A cigarette stood on its end, a half-dollar balanced on its edge and its timing had the precision of a fine electric clock." It is difficult now to imagine the level of fascination the Eye of the Needle provoked. As soon as it was built, it starred alongside Elvis in the (somewhat forgettable) It Happened at the World's Fair. Lincoln Kirstein, writing in The Nation, marveled that the restaurant was "so perfectly balanced that a one-horsepower motor is all that is required to swing" it. (Keep in mind, though, that like all revolving restaurants, only a portion of the inside--the "turntable"--actually rotates.) An Eye of the Needle waitress told Life that "serving the soup is like catching the brass ring on a merry-go-round"; color-coded sections helped waitresses find customers. The elevators were so full of visitors during the day that food had to be delivered at night with "precision estimates of the day's needs." A New Yorker cartoon showed two people looking up at the imposing Needle; one deadpanned, "I'm not that hungry." The Space Needle put the revolving restaurant on the map. Suddenly, every city was clamoring for one of Graham's patented revolving restaurants (or perhaps someone else's: Rod Kirkwood, an engineer who worked with Graham, says, "We learned fairly early on that a patent didn't keep somebody from doing what we had done"). The revolving restaurant became not just a big tourist draw but a must-have weapon in the civic arsenal of every latter-day Babbitt: revolving restaurants were the riverboat casinos of the Sixties and Seventies. In 1968, Business Week reported that the Hyatt hotel chain, prompted by the success of its Polaris in Atlanta, would build a revolving restaurant atop every new hotel. In Europe, Leonhardt's Stuttgart tower had touched off an explosion of tower building; the new ones, however, from Mannheim to Moscow, had revolving restaurants. It was even rumored that the Fernseh-turm in East Berlin moved particularly fast, so people in the West could see that it revolved, a demonstration of the technological superiority of the GDR. The desire for views--heightened by everything from Cinemascope to the advent of mass airline travel--and the culture of convenience intersected in the revolving restaurant, which emerged as the seminal "entertainment restaurant." For pop-culture taxonomists Jane and Michael Stern, they were essential to the space-age bachelor's mastery-over-nature lifestyle, described in Sixties People: ". . . zooming through the clouds in a 707 to some swinging pleasure capital, seducing a voluptuous woman in his penthouse above the city, and, most deliciously, indulging in fine cuisine and oenophilic pleasures somewhere on top of the world." There were deeper motivations, too. A "consumer psychology specialist" told Business Week that "eating while revolving speaks to some of the major ambivalences of our time. In a revolving restaurant you can achieve stability and still be going someplace." And with Sputnik's launch and John Glenn's flight still reverberating, there may have been a subconscious desire to be closer to space, to "orbit" in climate-controlled comfort around the glittering urban constellation, served by airline-style attendants wearing blue uniforms with red capes But as revolving restaurants sprouted like metallic dandelions in every arriviste burgh from Houston to Columbus, they began to lose their novelty, moving from futurist icon to banal convention center appendage. And in buildings like Atlanta's Peachtree Plaza Hotel and Los Angeles's Bonaventure Hotel, built amid the urban tension of the early 1970s, the revolving restaurant can be seen as part of an attempt to shut the city out by presenting it as a distant spectacle--what postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson, writing about the top of the Bonaventure, calls a "contemplative spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by the glass windows through which you view it." Rotation, not location, is central to revolving restaurant real estate. Often, these restaurants were built in spite of their view (or lack thereof). Mark Franklin, a partner in Baldwin & Franklin Architects, whose revolving restaurant projects include the Canadian National Tower in Toronto, explains that there doesn't seem to be "a correlation between [a revolving restaurant] and the relative beauty or ugliness of the surrounding environment." Business Week noted in 1968 that the roof below a revolving restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts, was landscaped "to compensate for the dull view"; and in Taipei, a revolving restaurant was planned above a garbage incinerator ("Diners can enjoy the view of Taipei and also examine the cleanliness of our garbage incinerator," a worker told Taiwan Television Enterprise magazine). At La Mirador on the outskirts of Havana, a small wood-paneled revolving (if occasionally lurching) restaurant perched atop an East Bloc-ish slab of concrete, I recently enjoyed "cocktails and landscape"--the latter being the expanses of Jose Martí Airport and Parque Lenin. Even a stunning view is no guarantee of success, however; there are many unique design considerations in planning a restaurant that will not only rotate, but please its patrons. Most important, according to Franklin, is getting people "close to the glass." He explains that "larger turntables offer a very high percentage of the patrons proximity to the circumference of the circle." Those who cannot sit next to the glass will need to see over those who can; "inevitably," Franklin continues, "these things end up with more complexity from a topographical point of view than you would find in an internalized restaurant." Ideally, tour groups should be separated from the "birthday and anniversary crowd." Then there is what Franklin calls the "stupid stuff." Visitors should not be presented with an overwhelming view the moment they step out of the elevator. Wayfinding devices need to account for the kinetic floor plan. The light must be constant so that moving diners can read their menus without distraction. Yet providing sufficient interior light presents the problem of creating interior reflections; most revolving restaurants use inclined glazing to shift images up or down. Everything rests on the turntable, of course. More than 75 percent of the world's restaurant turntables are made by the Danbury, Connecticut--based Macton Corporation. Its platforms have speed controls (while most restaurants stick to the once-an-hour schedule, they can be tuned to rotate once every 50 minutes, to get the lunch crowd out more quickly), and get twice-yearly inspections. Just as with an audio turntable, fluidity and consistency are prized. As a Macton brochure explains, "It must move smoothly and quietly day in and day out for years, with only routine maintenance. And it must be free of perceptible accelerations." In other words, diners should not be immediately aware that they are revolving. Like Muzak, the effect should be discernible but not overwhelmingly apparent. The goal is consumption--of both food and vistas--not stomach-tickling sensation. Which is not to say an "experience" is lacking. Revolving restaurants, after all, were pioneers of themed entertainment dining, where people willingly pay more for food if they're offered something above and beyond gustatory pleasure. The face of entertainment has changed, of course--today, a tourist in New York is more likely to buy a T-shirt at the Hard Rock Cafe than eat at the Marquis. But revolving restaurants offer something beyond a kitschy appeal or the pretensions of fine dining. They offer the city itself, arrayed as a subtly drifting panorama, viewed from a circular dining car on a radial journey where distance is transformed into time, with departure and arrival points fixed like points on a clock. While to us they may seem like artifacts suitable for Disney's quaintly futuristic Tomorrowland, in the world's fresher skylines revolving restaurants are still symbols of arrival, evidence of mechanical, social, and economic progress. And as they whir silently above the fluid cityscapes of Cairo and Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, they are observation posts for change itself. TOM VANDERBILT is a contributing editor to The Baffler and author of The Sneaker Book: Anatomy of an Industry and an Icon (New Press, 1998). |
Keywords:
revolving restaurants