Celebration: American Utopia or Stepford?
“The building of cities is one of man’s greatest achievements. Edmund Bacon, 1967
Celebration is over controlled and lacks social conscience. It is elitist: gingerbread glosses social inequity. Design omnipotency tied to corporate ends has resulted in a high-brow, overpriced subdivision on steroids.
PART 1: An Early Look at Disney’s ‘Celebration’
What if they built a city and nobody came? This master-planned city of 20,000 will have state-of-the-art health and educational facilities, a town center designed by the usual cadre of ‘important’ period style architects (including a rather surprising modernesque Philip Johnson entry) and approximately 8,000 residential lots of differing types and sizes, the widest being 90 feet with 15 foot side setbacks.
Architectural control includes inviolable first and second floor heights as well as window and door types, setbacks, massing and materials use per each distinct style. Porch, roof, and facade treatments have recommended design standards as well. The Strathmore model of the town center looked a bit contrived. Here were Pelli’s, Venturi’s, Stern’s, and Moore’s little monuments in the form of a bank, theater, apartment, office building, cultural center, lookout tower, etc. all arranged neatly on separate blocks. It seemed like a swell theme park to live in. Sometime after 1940 it was pointed out, “…architecture took a right, we are trying to continue the development (of well designed buildings, implied) as if it was never interrupted; we are taking the left fork in the road.”
I asked if the entry points were to be gated. Will the town center be able to sustain itself? Finally I put it together: First, like Seaside, this community was designed to keep the visitor uncomfortable from just wandering into town and enjoying the sights. Even with six allowable styles that quixotic architectural invention that makes a street-scape so charming and vital was not possible. Mixing Mediterranean with Classical outlawed Palladio.
Although the implicit goals of Disney are to introduce innovation for the better, their master plan has not sufficiently advanced modern urban planning practice in this case except to sterilize further. The free-standing artificiality of the town center reads more like an extension of Universal’s or Disney’s own facade-citecture at their studio lots. (For that matter the caricature replicas of Old World themes in Disney World appear to be more people oriented than at Celebration!) What makes the Continental example so compelling is the mix of old (history) and new, the density and mix of commercial and residential, and the evidence of life –as witnessed by people enjoying their walking, chance social meetings, shopping and watching, eating and playing, etc. The main issue under contention is that Celebration isolates and zones functions like so many other modern plans which results in the same automobile centered or formally laid out suburban design. Consider the simple presence of street vendors (outlawed typically) which add so much color to the street life. The town dies. This dilemma is especially true with planned towns such as Celebration and Seaside and the host of others ‘a l’Americaine’.
Architecture cannot solve planning issues.
The final irony is this: over twenty five years ago Walt Disney created the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow (EPCOT) as a showcase to house and employ a viable population; real people in a working environment.
Upon receiving some criticism for the above remarks and after considering the matter further I came across a social study of Pullman, Illinois (10 miles south of Chicago) considered a model community built in 1881 which included housing and basic service amenities (as well as the factory for the Pullman Palace Car Company) where 8,000 people lived and worked. “One of Mr. Pullman’s fundamental ideas” as social critic and economist Richard Ely wrote in his analysis of the town “is the commercial value of beauty”. Pullman commissioned a single architect to master plan and design the entire town. There was a market-house, theater, library, offices, shops, bank, hotel, fire department, educational facilities, etc. In describing the street-scape Ely observes:
Unity of design and an unexpected variety charm us as we saunter through the town. A public square, arcade, hotel, market, or some large building is often set across a street so ingeniously as to break the regular line, yet without inconvenience to traffic. It is not the American ideal. Style should never be legislated.
It is unfortunate that in newly developing towns and smaller communities the rich texture of classic urban models cannot be convincingly replicated.
Americans have for too long accepted the fruits of modern planning principles which breed monotonous city-scapes erected by rote to planning manuals designed with dispersive (instead of implosive) zoning with the resultant isolation of its parts, suburban and infrastructural waste.
On this point Celebration misses the mark. Corner groceries were once evident in the zone-free organic town of yesteryear but are absent here.
“The building of cities is one of man’s greatest achievements.
Does Celebration propound to be the quintessential American town?
Disney must be applauded for their grand efforts, and meticulous attention to detail as always but to attempt the ideal and miss the mark so clearly by organizing the layout of their dream town to exclude the components that constitute the soul and lifeblood of any community (as experienced in historically viable models of living cities) will only result in a sterile aggregate of construction to be possibly abandoned like the American towns whose main streets have been bypassed, shopping relegated to the peripheral super-malls, and inner core left to decay. Architect James Marston Fitch has described the Italian street as “the most delicious experience of embrace and enclosure of any space on earth”. The satisfying people/streetscape that Disney has created in EPCOT is a fantasy enjoyed by millions. Cities like Charleston and Savannah are perfect models for the living community.
New Urbanism – A Critique of Disney’s Celebration – Social Elitism, Developer’s Practicality-Profit
Ground Floor:
The whole ground floor, staircase and both bathrooms are finished in extremely high quality large porcelain tiles.
The large entrance hall (which also leads to the rear door, pool and terrace) features exposed timber beams and central pillar.
The Guest suite has an on-suite bathroom and double glazed patio doors leading to the terrace and pool.
The staircase leads from the main entrance hall to a large open plan with high ceilings and large picture windows, patio doors leading to a 44 sq.m. decked terrace with highly polished stainless steel handrail ; balustrades.
The master bedroom suite has an en-suite bathroom containing hydro massage bath, separate shower cubical, toilet, bidet and wall hung basin. The floor and walls are finished in large high quality porcelain tiles.
Other features include automatic lighting control, intercom entry phones to floors, automatic electric garage gates, solar panels for hot water heating, heat pump for the swimming pool and an abundance of electrical outlets.
This property is being marketed by Expedia Property SL in Tenerife.
