Disney Goes Pop
The authors of Learning from Las Vegas—early proponents of
the bold and the garish—take a look at King Mickey’s latest
resort.
By Denise Scott Brown
April 2004
Disney’s Pop Century Resort designed by Arquitectonica offers
nostalgic accommodations in a landscape of jumbo-size icons of
twentieth-century pop culture. Each decade is represented by a hotel
decked out with familiar sayings and enormous objects reminiscent of
the era.
In his famous 1965 essay “You Have to Pay for the Public
Life,” Charles Moore described Disneyland as a monument in a
society that has no establishment and no need of one. It’s built,
he said, by “men willing to submerge their own Mickey Mouse visions
in a broader vision of greater public interest, and who are nonetheless
willing and able to focus their attention on a particular problem and a
particular place.” These builders, Moore felt, must help create the
public realm. Moore was describing Disneyland, but his observations
would apply even better to Epcot and Celebration, the company’s
later forays into urban planning and new town building. In both, the
Mickey Mouse images—and commercial communication in
general—have been suppressed. This leads to a much
“nicer” environment, one appreciated by residents and
architects. Yet the absence of commercial vulgarity is also a sign of a
monopoly. Disney wants you to buy only their goods. Why should they let
in competitive advertising?
Where does this put Disney’s Pop Century Resort? It’s
beautifully done—a highly talented evocation of the Disney reality,
more European perhaps than American in its refinement. If Disney’s
reality is a picture book, then Pop Century is a picture book of a
picture book. But it’s as controlled as Epcot. There’s no jar
and jostle of competitors, and none of the precision of siting and
design that informs real commercial communication, for example, road
signs on a strip or billboards along a freeway. It’s a pretty
landscape of delight—and we should not ask more of it than we ask
of Disneyland.
The Las Vegas Strip, when we studied it in the 1960s, was much harsher
than this, and we learned from it more austere and general lessons than
those purveyed by Disneyland. The Strip taught us the relation between
perception, scale, and the speed of the automobile; the inner being of
the everyday environment; what popular culture could say to architects;
and the forgotten role of symbolism in architecture. These lessons we
applied to institutional and urban buildings and landscapes far from the
glitter of Las Vegas. Was this a better use of us?
There was a time when we dearly hoped to complete some of the designs
Disney commissioned us to do, and we feel mixed emotions when we detect
themes in entertainment architecture that relate to our Disney designs.
But we have been given other commissions as architects. Therefore what
we learned from Pop is evident in our writing, in a host of sketches for
unbuilt projects—and in weatherworn beach cottages, reticent
institutional and academic buildings, spaces and places that betray
their origins on the Strip only to the knowing and the canny.
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Standing beside the sixties hotel is a colossal can of
Play-Doh—that non-toxic substance whose smell instantly transports
baby-boomers back to their childhood. |
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Symbolizing the “totally awesome” eighties, giant, perforated
rubik's cubes enclose the fire escapes on this Pop Century hotel. The
configuration of colored panels on each of the six cubes is different,
illustrating steps towards the puzzle's solution.
Images courtesy the Walt Disney Company |
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