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Post-Walt Wonders
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20456 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
2,026 Words |
| Author
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Marcus Binney
Marcus Binney, is president of Save Britain's Heritage. |
Disney has made a name around the world for make-believe architecture. Now just outside of Orlando, Florida, it is into the real thing. Over the last seven years, some of the professions' top names have been commissioned--yielding completed buildings by Arata Isozaki from Japan and Michael Graves and Robert Stern from the United States, as well as designs by Frank Gehry, Chicago's Helmut Jahn, AIA Gold Medal winner Charles Moore, and Italy's Aldo Rossi.
The new approach at Walt Disney World is there for all to see on Interstate 4, the main highway across Florida. Here in the language of the American strip is a Post-Modern send-up of the Doge's Palace by Robert Stern. Stern's design is deliberately flip, intended to intrigue any passerby precisely because many of Walt Disney World's 31,000 employees (collectively called Cast) are "walk-ins."
Next on the itinerary is Isozaki's Team Disney, an administrative headquarters in Lake Buena Vista. The approach road is wittily framed by a series of soccer goalposts with Mickey Mouse ears. The centerpiece of the façade is pure sculpture--an extraordinary explosion of colliding geometric shapes in brilliant colors. Here is Post-Modernism with its play on shapes transformed by fashionable "Deconstructionism"--without a vertical or horizontal surface to be seen.
The long matching wings containing the offices are more demure--in some lights they look like the standard grid of reflecting glass, until you see Isozaki has taken the whole game a stage further with windows and surrounding panels in a lively play of pale pink and gray. A haute couture version of Scottish tartan. The center of the building is an unnerving cylindrical courtyard, narrowing toward the top. You walk out on a series of carefully placed stepping stones, avoiding the large ankle-twisting pebbles that cover the floor. The walls are virtually without windows, so all attention is focused on a giant sundial--architecture turned once again to sculpture.
The offices on either side are sleekly high tech. The predominant color is a battleship gray. This is the new Minimalism without a molding or projection to be seen Everything is flush, designed, so it seems, so that no dirt could ever settle.
Walt Disney World's most eye-catching new architecture is to be found in its hotels. Here Epcot Center has taken the lead from the Magic Kingdom with palatial twin hotels by both Michael Graves and Robert
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