by It is fitting that in the California desert city of Rancho Mirage, an incredible fantasy world should emerge from the parched, sandy land. At the star-studded intersection of Frank Sinatra Drive and Bob Hope Drive – named after two Hollywood celebrities who used to frequent the area’s exclusive country clubs – a sign represents Cotino’s arrival, “Storyliving by Disney community”. In this square mile of desert near Palm Springs will be a sparkling new world of 2,000 homes set around a sparkling turquoise lake, where every aspect of life will be curated by the entertainment corporation.
Cotino offers superfans a place to live out their wildest dreams; a chance to live in a Disney movie “where the story is all about you”. There will be a clubhouse inspired by the futuristic mansion from Incredibles 2, where neighbors can band together for Disney-themed art lessons, enjoy dinners inspired by Disney stories and take part in family activity days related to Disney.
An unnatural shade of Avatar blue will be maintained on the lake all year round – thanks to Crystal Lagoons patented technology
The themed homes, which will start north of $1m (£792,000), are promised to be “infused with the company’s special brand of magic”, and will be in the center of the upcoming town, which will feature a street market where local artists will sell art and themes Disney. craft, “abundant with opportunities to laugh”. The 24-acre lake – a heavy compliment for an area suffering from severe drought – will be maintained an unnatural shade of Avatar blue year-round, courtesy of Crystal Lagoons’ patented technology. Cotino seems to be as close as you can get to living in Disneyland itself, with every detail by Disney imagineers, every service provided by Disney “cast members” (ie the staff).
Launching in 2022, with another 4,000-home development in North Carolina on the way, Storyliving by Disney represents the latest chapter in the world’s largest entertainment company’s expansion beyond the screen. It’s a century-old story that is being brought to life in a brand new exhibition at the Arc en Rêve architecture center in Bordeaux, France, which charts how Disney went from animating a talking mouse to sprinkling a themed fairy. dust over every aspect of our lives. The company’s $180bn portfolio now includes film production, cable and streaming channels, theme parks, cruise ship holidays, golf courses, theater productions, safari tours, music publishing, an airline, and even its own island in the Bahamas where you can snorkel around fake shipwreck.
With cinema and streaming revenue falling in recent years, revenue from Disney’s “experience” division is skyrocketing, and property development is the next logical step. Disney tried it before in Florida, first with utopian plans for Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), followed by the quaint town of Celebration, but Storyliving takes the branded living experience to the next level. It is calibrated to take advantage of the emotional attachment of loyal fans to House of Mouse when they make the most expensive purchase of their lives, while creating a captive audience to deal with branded services forever.
As Amy Young, creative director at Cotino, says in a promotional video: “You don’t see a lot of new home communities that people have a real emotional connection with, and we thought, ‘We have a real emotional connection with our guests. .” Clearly, an emotional connection is enough to make residents cough up $20,000 to join the Cotino neighborhood club, and $10,000 a year after that for the rest of their happily ever after.
The exhibition at Arc en Rêve, entitled The Architecture of Staged Realities, paints a portrait of Walt Disney as a natural developer, a cartoonist who understood not only how to draw people into his magical world but how to keep them coming back. It is a story of human psychology as well as architecture and design, with Walt self-styled as the avuncular wizard of happiness. As the curator of the exhibition, Saskia van Stein, says: “The American psyche was his main medium of communication.” And boy, did he know how to earn it.
Disneyland plays a central role in the story, as the first physical manifestation of Walt’s cartoon universe. Just as the modern Disney company is built on cross-promotion – with movies driving consumers towards themed rides and merchandise, and vice versa – Walt also understood the importance of television to the success of his theme park. In the 1950s, he struck a deal with the ABC television network to invest in his acquisition of 244 acres of land around Anaheim, California. In return for his investment, Disney himself would front a weekly television show for the network, in which he would tell stories about technological advances and alternate realities – and more importantly, update the audience on the process Disneyland construction.
“It will be a place of hopes and dreams, with facts and wonders all in one,” he announced in the opening episode as he looked at maps and models, introducing viewers to the nostalgic wild paradise in Frontierland; the futuristic utopia of Tomorrowland; and the rose-coloured Fantasyland, where “anything your heart desires”. More than half of all TV owners in the US were tuning in, giving Disney a rapturous audience of more than 28 million people. It was a brilliant marketing stroke: by the time visitors arrived at Disneyland, they were already familiar with it, having seen the plans evolve on their screens, which provided the kind of intoxicating frisson of meeting a famous person. in life.
The exhibit shows how brand partnerships were a key weapon in Disney’s promotional arsenal, starting with Monsanto’s House of the Future, one of Tomorrowland’s biggest attractions in the 1950s and 60s. A collection of cantilevered capsules made of reinforced plastic, this was a sci-fi hymn to the possibilities of plastic, containing a dishwasher, a microwave, a two-way camera for video calls, plastic crockery and an electric toothbrush – all long before part. widely accepted in suburban homes.
Bringing film stagecraft into the built environment, Van Stein will reveal how visual tricks are used in Disney parks, such as the use of “Go Away Green”, a patented shade of drab olive to make things disappear. It is used to color everything from lampposts to fences and loudspeakers – as well as the concrete foundations of the now demolished Monsanto House. Meanwhile “Blue Blend” is used to hide ugly higher structures.
Scale is also a key part of the illusion, with the floors of the buildings built incrementally shorter as they rise – at 5/8 scale above the ground floor, and 1/2 scale above that – creating a sense of the a cute and “pony sized” life, as Walt put it. He also took cunning poetic license with features such as the US flags found throughout the fields – each missing a star or stripe, allowing them to avoid the usual regulations of the daily raising and lowering of the Stars and Strips.
Another innovation – which has influenced today’s smart cities – is the utilidors, a sprawling network of underground service corridors that connect the different themed lands in Disney World Florida. They were introduced after Walt was disturbed by the sight of a cowboy walking through Tomorrowland on his way to his job in Frontierland in the California park, which Walt felt ruined the illusion.
The tunnels included automated vacuum waste disposal, hidden deliveries, dressing spaces for cast members, kitchens and emergency services, creating a quad “below stage” for the theaters above. As the New York Times architecture critic remarked after a visit in the 1970s, it boasted “an array of technical innovations that would make any city manager available,” perhaps the most important urban planning laboratory in the United States.
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Being staged in France, the exhibition has a section dedicated to Disneyland Paris and the surrounding suburban developments it left behind. After a long and tough competition between various European countries in the 1980s to host this hallowed center of US culture, the prize was awarded to France – and it had to charge more than four times what Disney bid for the privilege up. The project was described as a “cultural Chernobyl” in the French press at the time, and the park was seen as destroying a wide range of prime agricultural land. The gift that the head of Disney, Michael Eisner, gave to the future president of France Jacques Chirac, was not good either: the original painted celluloid animation of the Evil Queen offering Snow White a poisoned apple.
The exhibit documents the ongoing development of Val d’Europe, a new Disney-themed town adjacent to the park, created following a 1987 agreement that gave the company unprecedented control over urban planning codes over nearly 5,000 acres of surrounding land. The result is a surreal array of communities with Florida-style sweaters draped in fancy French dress, with clusters of inflated Hausmannian wedding cakes growing in the fields of Marne-la-Vallée. Eléa Godefroy’s eerie photographs, taken while walking around the edge of Disney land, document how these unreal enclaves sit within the surrounding countryside. Every year, they move a little more land, as the Happiest Place on Earth spreads across the globe.
• The Architecture of Staged Realities is at Arc en Rêve, Bordeaux, until 6 October
