Rocco Giannetti is a Principal and Co-Managing Director of Gensler’s New York office. Rocco manages high-profile projects throughout New York City, including office interiors for Morgan Stanley, Société Générale, and Citigroup’s Headquarters, as a specialist in the Financial Service Firms Practice Area and as a Firmwide Workplace Sector Leader. He has also led initiatives for well-known media companies such as Condé Nast, The New York Times, and Warner Media. Rocco is currently in charge of the firm’s work at EY’s headquarters. He is an Account Relationship Leader at Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, with a focus on financial services businesses. We had the honor of seating with him and unveiling a bit more of his impressive resumé.

When asked about his journey through the fields of architecture and design, Rocco affirmed that he’s one of these people that from a very early age felt a clear direction towards architecture and design. “I’m not sure exactly where that came from, it’s not from a family history of being architects or designers, but I just remember early on always having an awareness of my environments around me and an interest in noticing design details”, he added. He had always an affinity towards design and environments. From a very early age, and this is carried throughout his career, he has always somehow had a vision of doing things. “I’m a planner and I don’t mean just a space planner? I plan the next steps in the future, so I always have the vision and I’m always working towards that. Maybe I kid around, but I think it’s an important personal philosophy. If you don’t have kind of an optimistic or progressive future in your personal windshields tech to move towards, then you know you’re not going in that kind of a direction.”

“So it’s really having the great fortune to be given some kind of ability to have a vision and to always make plans, I’m a planner!” – Rocco Giannetti

Rocco Giannetti completed his undergraduate professional architecture degree at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and another one of his life goals and visions was to move from New Jersey to the Big Apple. After finishing his design education at Pratt, and having worked for a handful of years at a few medium-sized and small firms, Rocco wanted to continue his education after working for a few years and he got a master’s degree at Princeton University. “So I moved back to New Jersey for a couple of years, but I was just a train commute away. When I came back to the city, in the early 1990s, it was a terrible economic environment and it was difficult to find employment. So I was working in a small firm that I was referred to by a friend of a friend, and after about a year, I had some friends that I knew in the industry that I had mentored as well and that was working at Gensler here in New York”, he stated. When he came to work at Gensler, he saw a couple of things that he had never seen before at a design firm that aligned with his path.

 

“The first thing I saw was it was very well-managed. I had worked in other large and small firms, and I didn’t see that kind of business acumen or the proper way for running the business of design (like I always say), so that was something that interested me, so I wanted to, you know, explore that here. The other thing that was very interesting to me, that I never saw anywhere else, and this is 1994, is there were a lot of women that were leaders? And you never saw that at the other big design firms… There were some women but was not very common… So I wanted to understand what they did (the women) to succeed? Because they had to do something very different from men in order to be successful in this design field.” So that’s how he came there, and those are the things that he really latched on to, to follow his path of leadership, professional development, and growth.

Regarding the philosophy for leading the Gensler NY office, Rocco added that his vision centers around the people’s rights and making sure that they have the best talent. “I always look for a couple of qualities in people in terms of talent… So there are individuals that have a great ability to work with representation or a design eye. But for me, what I find most interesting about potential is someone that has high intellect and curiosity, and those are the things that I think really propel innovation and new ways of doing things, I think those are the things that I try to promote. As an environment, as a professional place of business, what I like to also nurture is learning and development by giving people lots of opportunities to learn new things and to work with each other in order to have these different ideas and different points of view. I personally believe in this, but also our philosophy centers a lot around collaboration, and teams and this idea of how the collective adds up to much more than the individual? So these are all important ideas.” Certainly, for his entire career, the bare requirement, the basic minimum, is design excellence, right from every aspect, from the quality of the design to the execution, to the ideas behind it, and to how they work with their collaborators and their clients. These are really big topics that are important to him as a person, they’re important to Gensler, and he certainly wants to foster an interest on the part of their team members to always consider that in the work that the firm does and how they behave as an office, and as individuals.

Being one of the biggest references of leadership not only in NYC but also at an international level is quite the task, but for Rocco, the responsibility doesn’t go to his head or let it linger: “I don’t really think about that. I think about being myself, and I think about always doing not only my best but doing better? You know, always challenging myself to do better, and if that’s recognized, that’s great. I mean, I don’t say that offhandedly, I think it’s important to have that recognition… It’s important to the role and the responsibilities to be acknowledged for it. I think that’s maybe more relevant to me, to be acknowledged for what I’m doing, what we’re doing, more than sort of the spotlight and recognition fame or familiarity or something like that. Everyone has a reputation, right? And I think my reputation in the industry is someone who is very fair-minded, thoughtful… and those are important attributes that I want to communicate.”

 

When asked about the biggest challenges of his work, Rocco reminisces about managing his team. The bigger the team, the more people on the team and the more different points of view, personalities, desires, and interests. Although it sounds like an unmanageable task, for Rocco is not: “I mean, you set a tone, you establish a culture, you create an organization and you delegate. I’m managing a team of leaders that in turn, is managing another team, a team of other leaders potentially, or managing another team of people… that’s really how you do that. It’s the people part that’s probably one of the bigger challenges. There are many complexities in this industry, like budgets or all kinds of different objectives that clients put at us that sometimes that there not the same thing from one day to the next… I mean, it’s a very challenging and dynamic business that we’re in. Every day there’s just, it’s something new that’s different from yesterday and it will change tomorrow? So you really have to be agile and not get flustered by any of that.” There’s a lot of meaning behind his work, his work ethic and attention to detail are certainly some of the messages he intends on conveying but is much more than that: ”Design excellence and creating great environments for people, but for me at this point in my career (as I said, I’ve been doing this for a long time), I think now I have the opportunity to align some of the things that matter to me as a person into our work. What do I mean by that? I think it goes back to climate action. That’s really important to everyone, it’s really important to me, and so I like to see that talked about and incorporated and accomplished in every one of our projects. Then the idea this idea of social justice and social equity. We create space for all kinds of people, and space can be inclusive or it can be exclusive? I’m more on the inclusive side, obviously, and the emphasis on being really thoughtful and considerate about how spatial environments and design impacts so many different people. And what and what we do and even things that we’re not even conscious of how they can make someone feel welcome or unwelcome.“

Rocco is now focusing on a couple of projects which go directly towards his core competency, which is working with financial service firms. Working on two headquarter redevelopment projects in New York City for two very big banks, both of which have the name Morgan in them. He spent time there in New York City and also has a residence in Montclair, New Jersey, where he’s also working on some redevelopment projects allowing him to encourage more of these ideas around sustainability and social equity, and community impact.

“So it’s kind of exciting, I lead a double life. I’m a New Yorker and I’m a small-town person, and rather than minimize my time in both places, I just, you know, give them equal attention and energy.” – Rocco Giannetti

To finalize, we asked about his future and what’s next to unveil, where Rocco amusingly answered: “Well, my vision is a brighter future? As I said earlier, if you don’t see a positive future, then where are you going? You’re not going there, and that’s what I’m working towards… My goals are into making New York a better place, provide our clients with the opportunity to inhabit a better place, and then also, make the local community (that I also reside in) a better place. So I think in the future, there are a lot of challenges and obstacles in the way right now, which is surprising, but I believe that will push through and move forward and do great things and good things. That’s my vision of the future. Maybe that’s more philosophical than design-oriented”, he finished laughing. We also asked for a small piece of advice to our readers and especially to young designers, where Rocco replied that one important piece of advice is optimism. “If you don’t have an optimistic point of view, perspective, or vision, then it’s going to be harder. So I think that’s very important. What we do is hard work, you have to be prepared and willing to accept that. I would advise them to gather as many different experiences as they can, and not just experience directly related to what we do, but life experience because all of that contributes to making richer and better environments for the design work that we do.” We are humbled to have the opportunity to interview such an inspiring and professional opinion leader. We’ll keep an eye on Rocco Giannetti’s career and of course, every astonishing project from Gensler.

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