Defenders of Disneyland often cite the fact Disney created a world that was never there until he conceived of it, and that this alone is a sufficient accomplishment. A facile argument. Why consumer escapism as opposed to enlightened social transformation of our "real" environments and communities? I can only answer that Disney's films, though I only saw a few as a kid, Fantasia for one, remained engraven on my memory as something distinct from nature, or the city life I was accustomed to. The syntheticism of the cartoon genre was attractive precisely because it was so out of the ordinary. Perhaps it was this sense of non-referentiality embodied in the cartoon genre that led Disney to dream of non-spaces, extraordinary funfairs that could capture the hearts and minds of post-War America's children and have them exiting the place smiling. Was it all a response to a sense of loss. either personal or from the War or depression?
As early as 1939, in the era of the Studebaker and of the electric toaster, Walt Disney already conceived of a studio on a 51 acre lot in Burbank, California. An ideal city, removed from and better than the surrounding world, its design would be linear and rational with streets named Dopey Drive and Mickey Avenue. After the Second World War, when Disney visited Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Michigan with its idiosyncratic mixture of historic buildings (Stephen Foster's house, Thomas Edisons lab, the schoolhouse to which the little lamb once followed Mary from the nursery rhyme and Ford's childhood farmhouse) and the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948 with its replicas of "lands" or villages, including a New Orleans French quarter, a national park with a mechanical geyser, an Indian village, and a fairground train that toured the sights, Walt Disney began to plan the building of a theme park like the Chicago Railroad Fair. His was to be conceived of as having a beautiful setting like Tivoli Park in Copenhagen, Denmark.
In 1954, when the groundbreaking ceremonies for Disneyland finally took place after consultation on planning from the management of Coney Island of Cincinnati and the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, the public was still in the dark as to what Disneyland actually would be like. The following year, Disney elaborated, and the public witnessed, the gradual building of Disneyland week by week on Disney's television programme. It became one long advertisement for the park. When Disneyland officially opened on July 17th, 1955 the ceremonies were presented live on ABC. What an irony in hindsight, since like the proverbial PacMan, Disney gobbled up ABC like another energy bite in 1985. Indeed, on hearing of this Charlie Gibson admitted on Good Morning America: "I never thought I'd work for a guy named Mickey!"
Disney's original theme park has now been cloned. Detractors stay away, while others flock with their whole fam damilies to bathe in it all. There's Eurodisney south of Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, the Epcot Center in Florida as well as the California staple Disney. European philosophers, postModernists and semiologists seem hidebound to the place when they hit American soil. Umberto Eco's favourite Disney rides are the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted House, Jean Baudrillard basks in Disney's signifiers and non-referentiality. But Disneyland is not just nostalgia. This is the heartblood of Republican goodwill, a Jack-in-the-Box with a difference. Corporate socialism, uniformed assistants, all of this blandness is a great equalizer. There's no room for dangling metaphors here. Poet John Ciardi called Disneyland "Foamrubbersville" after seeing all its ersatz creatures and Julian Halevy decried the fact the Jungle Cruise was not the real thing in an article titled Disney and Las Vegas published in The Nation in 1958. His admonishing critique of the papier-mâché crocodiles and muddy water on the Jungle Island Cruise came off like Walter Benjamin in drag. What sad, empty lives accept such tawdry substitutes for "real experience"? Perhaps people who've had far too much of a dose of reality. The plastic and fibreglass animals presented a simulation of danger to kids back in the McCarthy era of the 1950's but it's the real live decontextualized Asian elephants in Adventureland that are a greater concern.
New Orleans Square opened in 1963 - a transitional zone between Adventureland and Frontierland relying heavily on Audio-Animatronics figures. Haunted Mansion robotic ghouls, the Pirates of the Caribbean Island fortress, a New Orleans cafe, a waterfall and the experience of being adrift, the list of innovations designed to amuse us all to death goes on. There are always new rides being introduced. Like the Indiana Jones TM Adventure opened at the first curve in the river past the Jungle Cruise dock complete with an evocative hybrid of Mayan and Cambodian temples lost in an "impenetrable" jungle. (A computer-controlled passenger vehicle allows movement in any direction.) The synthetic pastiche of these places represent nowhere and everywhere at one and the same time.
Time has caught up with Tomorrowland, the Orlando, Florida version of a 1930's vision of the future. The MIT designed Monsanto house erected at Tomorowland Gate in 1957 with its suggestion of technological innovation is a strange cruciform monument to techtopia made of modular fibreglass components bolted to a concrete base. Monsanto has four wings like the petals of a Martian flower - the international style humanized - that extend out from a boxy glass structure like a giant Brunswick TV set. The 1959 monorail at Tomorrowland was the first of its kind in North America. Disney died in 1966 of lung cancer leaving plans for the Epcot Center still sitting on the drawing board as his legacy, having drawn his plans for traffic flow at Epcot on a table napkin for management to realize. Robert Venturi, Peter Blake, James Rouse are all architects who are fans of some aspect or other of Disneyland.
But let's talk of the exhibition proper. Why such a show right now? One reason may be that the ever elusive Disney management now known as Imagineering has finally allowed the world to see the designs behind these dream places. As Marty Sklar, Vice Chairman and Principal Creative Executive Walt Disney Imagineering commented on the occassion of Walt Disney World's 25th anniversary, theme parks have seldom been considered suitable subjects for traditional museum shows. What's more, Imagineering was paranoid about exposing the secrets of Disney design and engineering to the public for a very long time, preferring to maintain a mystique as to how all this fun came to pass. Invisibility was the key to public credibility. Have you ever seen Mickey Mouse do anything unsavory? (Thence came Fritz the Cat). The security guards on these sites are so cleverly disguised you never see them or the networks of tunnels underground that connect it all together.
Arranged in a layout like Disneyland itself, The Canadian Centre for Architecture's exhibition recreates Disney's "hub-and-weenie" plan with the original models for Disneys Main Street U.S.A. at its central core and the other areas extending outwards from this. Yet another irony: escapist architecture now given the museological and historical stamp of immortality. Some 350 Disney-commissioned objects from the archives of Walt Disney Imagineering, models for the Disney parks as well as futuristic architectural plans, sketches, and the like are on view. More interesting is the Fantasyland section of the show, where the architecture conceived for the cartoons themselves is examined. Disney's simulations of real architecture such as the Piazza San Marco in Venice, the Eiffel Tower are there too. Real World architecture presents two theme hotels - the Contemporary and Polynesian - the only structures designed for Disney in collaboration with an architect (Welton Beckett). Attention is likewise given to Walt Disney's unrealized plan for a real industrial city on his 28,000 acre Florida property known as Project X. Though never built, the waste disposal and traffic circulation innovations planned for Project X were used at the Magic Kingdom and elsewhere at Walt Disney World. As early as 1964 the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury defended Disney's simulacra of jungle atmosphere and plastic crocodiles in Adventureland and insisted Disney had already solved most of Los Angeles problems with his Disneyland designs. Bradbury was later consulted by Imagineering on the design of Spaceship Earth in the Geosphere at EPCOT.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture is also exhibiting a series of photos of the actual Disney sites from around the world by Catherine Wagner, most of them taken when the public was not there. The absence of people makes them seem almost like ... cartoon settings, albeit real. If these are really non-spaces, then these designs, so carefully accounted and realized to incorporate traffic flow and distraction, may leave us all somewhat bewildered. One can only wonder if social interaction as defined by Disney, even if fantastic, is entirely healthy, for its exudes a conformity that is at once familiar and unsettling. Gee! Wow! If one could only tape the visitors conversations before entering, during the out of body Disney experience and after exiting. It would make for an interesting sociological study. The conversations between the actors who dress up daily for this pantomime after work would also...
John K. Grande