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

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

The complex relationship between Disney's entertainment empire and progressive architecture is crystallized by an anecdote told by Frank Gehry in the catalogue for "Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance," an exhibition organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and recently presented at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. In an interview with the show's guest-curator Karal Ann Marling and Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the CCA, Gehry recounts a meeting in which several prominent postmodern architects, including himself, unveiled designs for hotels at Euro Disney (later renamed Disneyland Paris). He describes a scheme by Robert Venturi which included a monumental allee of 150-foot-high cutouts of Mickey and Minnie Mouse which Venturi "presented ... like an architectural professor from Princeton, very dry, comparing it to the Champs-Elysees, filled with historical references." Gehry comments 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 very important ... that Venturi plays close 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 text on American commercial vernacular, Learning from Las Vegas, should be deemed unfit by a Disney executive to contribute to the genre himself. Whether on account of his professorial demeanor, or because of his insistence on the relationship between Disney's grand schemes and earlier conjunctions of architecture and power, it would seem that Venturi was both too ironic and too serious in his proposed monumentalization of Disney's fantasies.

The crux of the problem 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 remote place, or of a singular fantasy lifestyle. Gehry has more to say about this relationship with regard to his own experience designing Festival Disney, a shopping and entertainment complex adjoining the hotels at Disneyland Paris:

I was not given the Festival Disney project to theme, and from the beginning I was worried about that. Bob Fitzpatrick, who was the head of Euro Disney ... was very clear that he was not asking me to do a themed project. However, when I saw the building finished, in the context 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]

Both Gehry and Venturi have developed 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 often 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 by the wholesale simulation at the core of each park of a historically remote shopping district, Main Street, U. S. A., whose nostalgic facades only thinly veil the very contemporary emphasis on aggressive souvenir retailing within. If on the one hand, Venturi's deployment of vernacular language proved too piquant for an "architecture of reassurance," on the other hand Gehry's distinctive architectural idiom was too easily reframed as a signature style, "a Frank Gehry theme."

From Times Square in New York, where Disney's redevelopment projects have begun to transform the nation's most 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 never existed), this mega-media congolomerate has had, and will continue to have, an enormous impact on American urbanism. Corporate theming has significantly surpassed the necessarily limited programs of progressive postmodern architects. A dark vision of architectural theming emerged, for instance, in the recent film The Truman Show, in which a starting role is played by the Florida town Seaside, whose strict zoning plan was developed in the 1980s by the well-regarded planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater Zyberk. This brilliantly themed resort, meant to recall the pleasing low 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 subject of a long-running pseudo-cinema-verite television show disseminating the banalities of his everyday life--any of us who go to the mall, or eat in any number of themed chain restaurants, or visit historic urban centers ranging from Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston to the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, may feel stuck in someone else's movie.