Building a dream

From fairy-tale castles to extraordinary buildings designed by the world's most distinguished architects, The Walt Disney Company has set new standards for the imaginative use of popular imagery in architecture. The company's enormously influential architectural philosophy, first expressed more than fifty years ago at Disneyland, draws on characters and settings from the world's most compelling legends and stories, especially Disney's own remarkable animated films. Meanwhile, over the past decade, Michael Eisner, the present chairman of the company, commissioned leading architects such as Robert A. M. Stern, Michael Graves, Robert Venturi, Arata Isozaki, Frank Gehry, Aldo Rossi, and Arquitectonica to execute important buildings for Disney, absorbing into their own styles some of the lessons of the Disney tradition. The result, says author Beth Dunlop, is "architecture with a plot," a new approach to designing buildings. In the early 1950s, Walt Disney turned from the two dimensions of film to the three dimensions of architecture as a medium to express his vision. Working with animators and architects, he created such familiar icons for the Disney theme parks as the castles, Main Street, and the "lands" that comprise the Magic Kingdoms. The theme parks have expanded enormously under the guidance of Michael Eisner to become some of the world's most popular tourist destinations. Eisner also embarked on an ambitious building program outside the theme parks and became, in the process, one of the world's significant patrons of contemporary architecture on a grand scale.