Mickey Mouse, Master Builder

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 14, 2001 | by Joanna Shaw-Eagle, | Lisa Rauschart

Walt Disney would have been 100 years old this year had he lived. Now the founder of the worldwide entertainment empire is being saluted for his architectural aesthetics.

The Walt Disney Company has had an extraordinary history in American culture with wonderful architectural forms," says Susan Henshaw Jones, president of the National Building Museum in Washington. "To say that it has the most symbolic structures in America is not an overstatement."

The museum is attempting to illustrate that statement with "Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance," an exhibition of 200 drawings, plans, models, renderings and archival photographs that traces the development of Disney's ideas from his first, unsuccessful park in Burbank, Calif., to the posthumous creations in France and Japan.

In addition to the exhibit, Jones and her colleagues recently paid tribute to Disney Chairman Michael D. Eisner and the company with their 2001 Honor Award, presented since 1986 to individuals and companies that have made significant contributions to architecture, planning and building. Under Eisner's leadership during the last 16 years, Disney has commissioned 80 buildings from some of the nation's most innovative architects, including Michael Graves.

Disney buildings rely not so much on the intricacies of design as they do on themes. At best, Disney architecture is a mixture of wit and whimsy that transports the viewer into an engaging world. The company headquarters in Burbank, designed by Graves in 1991, features a pediment supported by seven 19-foot, cast-concrete dwarfs, for example. For the 1,500-room Dolphin Hotel at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., Graves created a mock ziggurat adorned with dolphins.

"Disney's hotel architecture is really part fantasy, part functional," says architect Hugh Hardy, a member of the museum's advisory council and a cochairman of the award ceremony. "But its real genius is its ability to absorb families peacefully and happily."

The importance of family is most apparent in the town of Celebration, Fla., a Disney experiment in urban planning that combines state-of-the-art facilities with a palpable connection to the past. In Celebration, homes surrounded by front porches and picket fences mimic the feel of Small Town, U.S.A., although few such communities feature a post office designed by Graves or an art-deco movie theater by Cesar Pelli.

Eisner and Walt Disney Co. also have made significant contributions to urban renewal, museum representatives say. They cite the 1993 revitalization of New York City's Times Square, spurred by Disney's restoration of the New Amsterdam Theatre. "Disney didn't want to be the only kid on the block," says Hardy, who worked on the project. "It was important to them to work in concert with other tenants who would make a commitment to the revitalization of the whole area."

Then, of course, there are the theme parks. Disney's newest, Anaheim's California Adventure, just opened on the site of a parking lot in front of Disneyland. Although smaller than the original, the park's commitment to detail -- and its references to the past -- is characteristic. The Cannery Row dining area features weathered, corrugated iron siding. Condor Flats evokes a 1940s airfield with mock hangars. Visitors to the theme park can eat lunch on a soap opera set or pick fruit and vegetables in the Bountiful Valley area.

The Architecture of Reassurance" exhibition is dense with documentation about Disney after he moved to Los Angeles in 1923. His animation business in Kansas City, Mo., had failed, and he began a film company with his brother Roy that year. The show would benefit from more material about Disney's youth. Young Walt and his family spent four years in Marceline, Mo., before moving to Kansas City. He remembered those years as idyllic, and always recalled the community spirit of harvesttime.

Disney's father, Elias, moved the family to Kansas City in 1911. Elias obtained a paper route and had Walt delivering papers at 3:30 a.m. The youngster would climb icy steps to place papers behind customers' storm doors, while other boys threw them on lawns. Disneyland's Main Street derives in part from Walt's experiences during this period, and he got the idea for Magic Mountain from the town's garbage dump, a former slag pit.

This exhibit is a scholarly show, however, concentrating less on biography and more on "Imagineering." As Disney's film company became more successful, he grew impatient with animation locked into the flatness of the 2-D screen. Children were asking to come to Hollywood and see where Mickey Mouse lived. He began thinking of a locale, "a little park, with statues of Mickey and the other characters, with picnic tables, grass and trees," writes curator Karal Ann Marling. (Walt Disney Imagineering opened the Disney Art Library to Marling and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the exhibit's organizers.)

Disney visited the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939 in San Francisco, which featured fantastic turrets, castles, palaces and towers. He traveled to Chicago in 1948 to see the Railroad Fair, which inspired him to build a railroad behind his house in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Beverly Hills in 1951. He looked at the old buildings Walter Knott had bought for his "ghost town." Knott was the owner of a successful berry farm near Anaheim and created the park as entertainment for customers waiting for his wife's celebrated chicken dinners.