The exhibition [1964 World's Fair] impressed Walt Disney so much that he hired Moses engineer William Potter to work on the EPCOT project, the Experimental Prototype of Tomorrow's Settlement, which he intended to build in Florida. In addition, he hired General Motors to create a car attraction, the proceeds of which were to be used to fund the experiment. Disney, as he himself put it, wanted to build an exemplary city for 20 thousand inhabitants, where there would be not only homes, but also schools and businesses. Public transport would be monorail, car traffic would be underground, and its surface would remain pedestrians - we still face such a standard element of radical urban concepts today, half a century later: when they decided to build the experimental eco-city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi It was originally planned to ban motor vehicles there, replacing it with automatic taxis moving underground.
As far as Disney's claims can be judged, EPCOT was conceived as a response to Jane Jacobs' concerns about the future of cities. With all the newfound material prosperity in America and Britain in the 1960s, anxiety grew behind the facade of external confidence that the physical fabric of the city, for all its apparent strength, was constantly on the verge of decay. The healthy flesh of the city can be destroyed at any time by even the most common infection that turns prosperous streets into slums. Disney was confident that everything would come out differently: “We will not have slum areas - we just will not allow them to arise. We will not have landowners, and therefore vote manipulation. People will not buy, but rent houses, and at very modest rates. We will not have pensioners either: everyone must work. One thing Disney didn’t understand was that building a city was more difficult than building a university campus, hospital, or business park. While the resort may have some urban trappings - places to work, eat, sleep, shop and study - it is ultimately not a city. None of them - not Osman, not Moses, not Disney - realized or believed that democratic governance plays a critical role in the formation and day-to-day functioning of a city. Without the democratic accountability of the authorities, it is impossible to analyze the tasks set and the results of their implementation, there is no chance to take into account the wishes of the poor and the marginalized, and there are no guarantees that public money will be spent honestly.
Walt Disney never built his city, but the Disney Corporation he created after the opening of the first Disneyland participated in the design and creation of real streets in real cities - if the word "real" in this context makes any sense. Shopping malls in Los Angeles, a revamped Quincy Market in Boston, and Silicon Valley office complexes - all these projects owe something to the knowledge and skills of Disney, his ideas about the street and pedestrians. During the period when Michael Eisner headed the Disney Corporation, the company seems determined to bring the tastes of the masses closer to high culture. The board of directors then included Robert Stern, dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Yale University. Contemplating a new amusement park outside Paris, Michael Eisner invited Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown to The Lessons of Las Vegas at his country residence to discuss his strategy with a group of other respected architects. In the end, Eisner studied the portfolios of almost all the prominent architects of our time: Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, Frank Gehry and a dozen other celebrities received invitations to submit detailed projects, which indicates an increase in the level of requests from the target audience of Disney.
The most paradoxical in this whole story is the inclusion of Aldo Rossi on the list. From such a decision, Senator Joseph McCarthy would have had enough kondrashka or he would probably have accused Disney of anti-American activities. The fact is that Rossi was a Marxist and a longtime member of the Italian Communist Party. Discussing the place of collective memory in the urban environment, he tried to introduce an element of poetry into urbanism. Despite Rossi's political convictions, Michael Eisner was determined to persuade him to work for Disney, and in the end he agreed to take a number of orders, but things did not go well. His project for a timeshare resort in Newport - in the form of a Mediterranean village with a copy of a destroyed Roman aqueduct - was never implemented, and Rossi himself refused to participate in Eurodisneyland, dissatisfied with the constant interference of the customer in its work. “Personally, I do not feel offended and could have ignored all the comments made about our project at the last meeting in Paris,” Rossi wrote. - When Bernini was invited to Paris to work on the Louvre project, he was tortured by officials who constantly demanded changes to the project to make it more functional. Of course, I am not Bernini, but you are not the king of France either."
Rossi's only Disney project to be completed was in Celebration, Florida. It is hard to say which category this 7,500-inhabitant settlement, created by Disney Corporation after the death of its founder, belongs to. Most often it is called a village. However, the most impartial characteristic of this settlement, where there are buildings designed by leading American postmodern architects, including Michael Graves, Robert Stern and Charles Moore, but there is no public transport, belongs to the US Census Bureau and sounds like this: "statistically isolated area" … Rossi designed a complex of three free-standing buildings for Disney employees. The configuration of the complex is borrowed from the Pisa Campo Santo: the buildings are grouped around a lawn with an obelisk in the center, and their facades include elements of classical architecture. In the middle of Florida, this space looks surreal and alien, like in a painting by de Chirico.
Rossi was fascinated by how the monuments left over from ancient cities survive, change over time and affect our lives today. For example, among the alleys of the Tuscan city of Lucca, you stumble upon an oval square surrounded by a ring of residential buildings based on the ancient Roman walls, and gradually you realize that there was once an amphitheater here. In the Croatian city of Split, the palace of Diocletian has been preserved - like a fossil in the middle of a modern city: buildings of all subsequent eras have adhered to its ancient walls. Rossi looked for ways to reproduce these historical layers and imprints in new buildings and cities with no past of their own. And he found an example in the most unexpected place: the simplified classical forms of the buildings of the Karl-Marx-Alley in East Berlin, as it seemed to Rossi, put the restrained grandeur of the monumental city at the service - he did not fail to note it - to the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie.
In his book City Architecture, Rossi outlined a new understanding of the city as "the collective memory of the people living in it." According to him, “the city itself is the collective memory of peoples; just as memory is tied to facts and places, the city is a locus of collective memory. This connection between the locus and the townspeople forms the dominant image, architecture, landscape; and just as facts enter memory, new facts are built into the city. In this quite positive sense, great ideas fill and shape the history of the city."
In another section of the book, Rossi defines the concept of "locus" as "a special and at the same time universal connection that exists between certain local conditions and structures located in this place." While Rossi's ideas of the city as a focal point for the collective memory of residents are tied to his Marxist beliefs and philosophy of structuralism, they have much in common with Disney's affection for Main Street USA as a reminder of the common American past - and therefore could well appeal to Disney Corporation.
Rossi and Disney, each in their own way, were great at evoking memories, associations and emotions through design. Rossi took the forms of a traditional European city deep into Florida in his Disney project, hoping to give the office complex a certain dignity and sophistication. But although visually, the work of the Disney and Rossi is quite convincing, they lack substance. An amusement park may look like a city, but lacks its inherent multi-layered meanings, so Disney tried to make a complex system like a city simple enough to control with the same methods it used on Main Street USA: a guided pedestrian movement and mummers. But to simplify the city means to deprive it of everything that ensures its functioning as a city. A place where the problem of poverty is solved by expelling people who have lost their jobs - as Disney suggested - is not a city. British politicians-conservatives should think about this, who refuse housing benefits to those families who live in prosperous areas, which means, in their opinion, do not deserve state support.
