Moguls on Main Street - Smithsonian Institution. Cooper-Hewitt Musuem, New York, New York

A traveling exhibition, publicly at the Cooper-Hewitt in of recent origin York, reflects the Walt Disney Company's signature amalgam of fantasy, spectacle and consumerism.

The manifold relationship between Disney's entertainment empire and progressive architecture is crystallized by means of an anecdote told by Frank Gehry in the catalogue for "Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance," an exhibition organized by dint of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and freshly presented at the Armand Hammer Museum in looks Angeles. In an interview with the show's guest-curator Karal Ann Marling and Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the CCA, Gehry recites a meeting in which several prominent postmodern architects, including himself, unveiled designs for taverns at Euro Disney (later renamed Disneyland Paris). He describes a scheme by dint of Robert Venturi which included a monumental allee of 150-foot-high cutouts of Mickey and Minnie Mouse which Venturi "present like an architectural professor from Princeton, true dry, comparing it to the Champs-Elysees, filled with historical references" Gehry make notess on the corporate response as follows: "Disney president Frank Wells got up and said, `You can't do this, Robert.' It pointed out to me something true important ... that Venturi plays shut up to theft edge, but he does it in a way that is art, that is meaningful, that is relevant to where we are in the world and what we are doing That's why he could not do work for them."[1]

It is striking that Venturi, who co-authored the canonical true copy on American commercial vernacular, Learning from Las Vegas, should be counted unfit by a Disney executive to contribute to the genre himself. Whether upon account of his professorial demeanor, or because of his insistence upon the relationship between Disney's grand schemes and earlier conjunctions of architecture and power, it would strike one as being that Venturi was both too ironic and too serious in his propos monumentalization of Disney's fantasies.

The crux of the riddle with Venturi's proposal may lie in the distinction between architecture, as an expression of values and contradictions, and theming, which might be described as the projection onto the built environment of a particular historically or geographically far off place, or of a singular fantasy lifestyle. Gehry has more to say about this relationship with regard to his have a title to experience designing Festival Disney, a shopping and entertainment compound adjoining the hotels at Disneyland Paris:

I was not given the Festival Disney shoot forward to theme, and from the beginning I was worried about that. move with a jerk Fitzpatrick, who was the head of Euro Disney was very clear that he was not asking me to do a themed throw However, when I saw the building finished, in the connection of other themed projects, it became clear to me that my building was a Frank Gehry theme. It was a theme de facto, whether I liked it or not.[2]

the pair Gehry and Venturi have make knowned important architectural practices through strategies of assemblage in which vernacular imagery and materials--ranging from roadside signs to chain-link fence--combine within serious and repeatedly monumental buildings. And yet, as Gehry indicates, this postmodern species of collage is quite distinct from Disney's ostensibly analogous strategies of pastiche and quotation, which is exemplified through the wholesale simulation at the core of each park of a historically distant shopping district, Main Street, U s A., whose nostalgic facades solitary thinly veil the very contemporary emphasis upon aggressive souvenir retailing within. If upon the one hand, Venturi's deployment of vernacular language prov too piquant for an "architecture of reassurance," upon the other hand Gehry's distinctive architectural idiom was too easily reframed as a signature turn of expression "a Frank Gehry theme."

From Times Square in fresh York, where Disney's redevelopment casts have begun to transform the nation's greatest in quantity notorious symbol of urban decadence into a tourist destination for families, to Celebration, Fla., a Disney planned community intended to recall a kinder, gentler America (which probably not at any time existed), this mega-media congolomerate has had, and will continue to have, an enormous impact upon American urbanism. Corporate theming has significantly surpassed the necessarily limited programs of progressive postmodern architects. A dark vision of architectural theming emerg for instance, in the new film The Truman Show, in which a starting part is played by the Florida town Seaside, whose strict zoning plan was lay opened in the 1980s by the well-regarded planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater Zyberk. This brilliantly themed resort, meant to recall the pleasing depressed density and architectural harmony of southern towns, functioned almost anthropomorphically in the film to regulate and constrain Truman's behavior. Like the Truman character--who is the unknowing control of a long-running pseudo-cinema-verite television present to view disseminating the banalities of his everyday life--any of us who proceed to the mall, or eat in any number of themed chain restaurants, or visit historic urban center ranging from Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston to the 3rd road Promenade in Santa Monica, may have feeling stuck in someone else's movie.