The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  LESS BUILDING, LESS HARM

  The impetus for the first of these lay in the early 1960s, when preservationist advocates like Jane Jacobs began to take a stand against the bulldozers of city improvers and developers that were flattening decayed neighborhoods and frayed civic landmarks (like Penn Station) in an all-out war against urban blight. Urban renewal planners were busy condemning inner-city neighborhoods in the belief that residents would lead safer and healthier lives in those low-density “towers in the park” to which they were relocated, most often without their consent. Rejecting this “doctrine of salvation through bricks,” in theologian Reinhold Neibuhr’s famous phrase, Jacobs took an eye-level view of her bustling Greenwich Village neighborhood, and, in The Death and Life of Great Cities, wrote an exuberant defense of its rich street life. She insisted that her neighborhood’s vibrant urbanism had taken shape organically, over many decades, and could not be summoned into being by top-down planners.2 Her 1961 book convinced an entire generation of the environmental sanity of preserving the high-density urban neighborhoods that planners were itching to condemn as slums. Jacobs’s legacy was equivalent to a giant “Do Not Disturb” sign. In her wake, respect was now extended to streets that had survived and evolved over a long span. But a moratorium would be declared on ideas about how to create new ones. It was a stark symptom of the cruel trauma of postwar planning that the status quo, however passive, would now be preferred to any new alternatives simply because it was less harmful than what had gone before.

  Jacobs’s immediate comrades-in-arms were community groups, bent on revitalizing or “unslumming” their own neighborhoods, not property speculators trading in nostalgia. But, over time, entrepreneurial offshoots of the preservation movement, ever on the lookout for value-added equity, created a lucrative market for the restoration or rehabilitation of old buildings. This enterprise took on a high commercial value in the 1980s, when run-down center cities attracted the realty interest of a new generation of young professionals in the urban service sectors. Among the budding yuppie ranks, a speculator’s eye for brownstone row houses, industrial cast-iron facades, pitched or mansard roofs, gabled dormers, and other ornamental details helped to drive the juggernaut of gentrification. Combined with the rapid disinvestment in city neighborhoods by private landlords and federal public housing programs, the impulse of the monied to repossess a chunk of urban history and buy up some of that “urban lifestyle” resulted in driving away a neighborhood’s poorer residents and thinning out the diversity that Jacobs valued. In an unintended irony, the preservation movement, forged to combat the planners’ uprooting of poor populations, ended up displacing almost as many residents, unable to afford to live any longer in their old neighborhood.

  In the meantime, other decaying urban sites, primarily harbors or old marketplaces, were sculpted into spectacular, sanitized re-creations of their own traditional forms—Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, Boston’s Quincy Market, Cleveland’s waterfront, and Baltimore’s inner harbor, among the better known. The use of historical recreation, whether a stimulus for residential property investment or for tourist power-shopping, was widely adopted as the key to reviving crumbling downtown areas. James Rouse, the master developer of these festival marketplaces and others, took his cue from the Imagineer theme masters. In a famous Harvard lecture, Rouse declared, following Moore, that “the greatest piece of urban design in the U.S. today is Disneyland.”

  Preservation in small-town America also took its cue from Disneyland. Anaheim’s gingerbread version of Main Street helped stimulate a nationwide campaign to revitalize all these boarded-up downtowns that had become tumbleweed territory with the arrival of the interstate highways and Wal-Marts. Under the organized thrust of Main Street programs (like those of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, first launched in 1977), hundreds of small-town efforts to seed a downtown renaissance got under way, aimed at reviving a commercial core of locally owned stores and restoring a civic commons. Spruced up and smelling of fresh investment, the new “historic downtown” was usually less a focal point for community locals than a lure for tourist visitors, to whose shopping requirements its stores catered primarily.

  To the seasoned eye, Celebration’s own downtown core was not so much a copy of a prewar town as it was a facsimile of one of these Main Streets that had undergone its own Disneyfied preservation makeover. So, too, there were other odd ways in which the preservation movement had made its impact in a brand-new town like Celebration. Here were many residents, like Lise and Ron Juneman on Honeysuckle Avenue, who had moved several times in their married lives, often spending a good deal of time and money on repairing old houses. In Celebration, the Junemans say they were “able to buy an ‘old’ house which needed no restoration work,” a solution that satisfied a number of well-defined boomer desires. Celebration cannot really pretend to be an idyllic, well-preserved, old town, but it can build in the expenses of restoration that would normally be incurred by gentrifiers buying into a close-knit urban neighborhood.

  MIXING IT UP

  Less direct, but no less important, in its contribution to the new traditionalism was the postmodern movement, which fostered most of the architects who designed Celebration’s signature buildings: Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Robert Stern, Cesar Pelli, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown. Defiantly cast as a revolt against the pleasure-denying reign of modernism’s flat roofs, sheer facades, superblock slabs, and transparent cubes, the postmodernists pledged to bring back some of the banished sensuality of past historical styles. For added measure, there would be a new appreciation of vernacular architecture, especially that of the commercial strip, where Colonial and Tudor and Roman and Mission jostled for attention alongside the exotica of Pueblo and Congo and Polynesia and Babylon. This new inclusive attention to popular culture promised a fresh dialogue with the public, and, it was hoped, some new clients for architects who had played virtually no role in the building of postwar suburbia.

  If the postmodernists set out to return the profession of design to a more democratic plane, the doors they intended to open were not exactly rushed by the masses. Their populist aims were largely thwarted by the 1970s recession and by the awkward but simple reality that architects, with no access to the purse strings, and with a bad rap from years of compliance with urban renewal and corporate patronage, were no longer in a position to effect any substantial changes in the design of the built public environment. Instead, the first wave of postmodern architects took the liberty of fashioning their own private medley of styles for mostly private clients, juxtaposing High and Low, Classical and Cartoon, Eternal and Everyday. All of architectural history became a supermarket of ingredients from which to concoct a new and daring cuisine. A postmodernist house could be a potpourri of international elements—Mediterranean Villa, Italian Baroque, English Regency—melded into one bold composite.

  For those who associated the profession with good taste, restraint, and decorum, the postmodernist foray into the funhouse was seen as an abdication of the architect’s moral faculties. For those who had stood by the modern movement’s commitment to building a better world, it was a nostalgic flight from present responsibilities. Critics complained that in the postmodernist funhouse, history and geography no longer had any particular meaning. Proponents of the widespread Greek Revival style of the early 1800s, for example, strictly copied the ancient orders—Doric, Ionian, and Corinthian—in the belief that this borrowed style best reflected the classical ideals of democracy and republican virtue embodied in the new American nation. By contrast, critics were hard put to find an equivalent for postmodernism other than that it reflected the anything-goes spirit of consumer markets. Yet style very rarely has a fixed meaning. As Gwendolyn Wright points out, the republican ideals expressed in Greek Revival columns and porticoes between 1820 and 1840 may have signified “civic virtue and social reform” in the anti-aristocratic Northeast, but were associated with “simple ways and democratic strength
in the West” and with “the heritage of slavery and aristocratic leadership in the South.”3 Even now, the neotraditional styles favored in places like Celebration invite different interpretations. For some, they do indeed evoke the time-honored virtues of civic community; for others they represent a stark retreat from the multicultural reality of modern America.

  Ultimately, the jaunty pursuit of postmodernism led its practitioners along the semiotically hot strip to a cool terminus—the gates of the Magic Kingdom. It was in the service of the Mouse that postmodernism found its most dependable employer. At a time when signature architects had long given up the prospect of finding clients among public or government authorities, a company with a commissioning power greater than that of some nation states, and with a vested interest in the inventive recreation of the past, would prove the ideal client for architects willing to serve up history without consequences. Clients who control the purse strings are usually concerned with service and marketable product, not aesthetic innovation. Disney was a client for whom the aesthetic impact of buildings was also the service and commodity component—a perfect solution for the postmodernist.

  Almost from the day that Michael Eisner took over in 1984 and canceled contracts with the Tishman developers for their torpid hotel plans at Disney World, the New Disney became a bounteous patron of signature architects. There are very few elevated names in this profession who have not either worked on, or been invited to compete for, Disney projects.4 At Disney World, the most lively examples of what Eisner called “entertainment architecture,” and what critic Beth Dunlop called “mauhaus moderne,” were Arata Isozaki’s Team Disney building (the first to win a major American Institute of Architects award in 1992), with its mouse-ear entrance and Brobdingnagian sundial; Stern’s Casting Center, a whimsical neo-Venetian hiring hall that sits in public view on the edge of the interstate; and Graves’s Babylonian-scaled Swan and Dolphin hotels. In Burbank, there was Graves’s Team Disney, with caryatids of seven dwarves holding up the pediments, and Stern’s Feature Animation Building, topped by the Mad Hatter’s hat.5 Such buildings often featured Disney icons in the figurative manner with which biblical and pagan deities had been treated in great civic structures since antiquity.

  The association with star architects generated oodles of cultural capital for a company that had captivated intellectuals in the 1930s with its vivacious cartoons, but had become a target of their disdain, if not the very symbol of inauthenticity, in the decades since. “The Art of Disney Architecture,” chosen as the theme for the American entry in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1996, marked a cease-fire in the hostilities and a milestone in the quest to reclaim a place for Disney in the landscape of high culture. Eisner began to compare the commissions of the Disney stable with the great public works of nation states, quipping, for example, that Aldo Rossi’s office building at Celebration “is our own La Défense.”6 The offhand comment, at a lunch event, harbored an insider reference to Eisner’s longstanding efforts to bring the Italian architect into the fold. A few years previously, Rossi had broken off discussions with Eisner about contributing a building to Euro Disney. Knowing that Bernini had once aborted his designs for the Louvre after disagreements with Louis XIV, Rossi declared, “I realize I am not Bernini. But you are not the King of France. I quit.”7 The prize of their reconciliation was Celebration Place, an office plaza set back from route 192, its cone and cubes sitting on an empty surreal plain worthy of de Chirico. A cool, Leggo-style recollection of Renaissance piazza buildings from the Pisan original, it was Rossi’s only design to be completed in the United States before he died in the fall of 1997.

  Unlike the tradition-oriented postmodernists who celebrated the past through witty allusion or through meticulously imitating its forms, Rossi believed that good urban building should try to evoke communal memories of the past by reminding people of places, things, and ways of life that the cruel velocity of modernization and its market civilization heedlessly erased. This kind of memory is not fueled by the comfort of nostalgia for the good old days. It should come as a shock, as meaningful encounters with history do, reminding us that the present is not some inevitable outgrowth from the past. This is quite different from “Disney realism”—the term often applied to the work of the Imagineers, dedicated to creating ideal, “improved” places and histories, the way they should have been but never were.

  All the prestige architects invited to produce Celebration’s civic buildings—Graves’s post office, Moore’s preview center, Johnson’s town hall, Pelli’s cinema, Venturi and Scott Brown’s bank, Robertson’s golf clubhouse, Stern’s health center and restaurants—exercised a quirky modesty in their designs. The point, after all, was to avoid self-indulgence in evoking classic civic forms. The results, though, are still quite at odds with the detailed period work of the residential housing. In the main, architectural critics pronounced these buildings as “disappointing.” Todd Mansfield, former TCC president, acknowledged that the deference of Disney toward star architects in the early planning stages of the town was a significant obstacle to the work of the planning team: “We lost two or three years in terms of cost and time.”

  Visitors can follow the architectural walking tour recommended by a brochure from the Preview Center, and biographical vignettes of the star architects are prominently featured in the brochure. But the efforts of these architects are seldom commented upon by Celebrationites themselves. One exception is Philip Johnson’s Town Hall, which residents seem to dislike universally. On occasion, Rossi’s office buildings and Pelli’s cinema are singled out for praise. In spite of their tributes to the past, they are often cited by residents as tasteful modernist contributions to the traditionalist palette of Celebration.

  TRADITION, NOT NOSTALGIA

  Once in Celebration, most townsfolk become acquainted with the term New Urbanism, although they are reluctant to grant its local relevance. Urbanism, after all, is associated with big-city life, whose density and anonymity are seen as undesirable for the most part. But everyone is more than familiar, in their daily lives, with the New Urbanist movement’s basic principles of town planning: a mixed-housing, mixed-use, walkable town with small lots, interconnected streets, and an identifiable center and edge. Architects aside, there are a few nonprofessionals in town who actively sought out a New Urbanist community to live in. Jim Bailey, president of the Celebrators, the seniors’ group, and his wife Shirley, looked at plans for New Urbanist towns in Colorado and Arizona, and decided on Celebration because it was further along in development. One of the most active citizens in the community, Bailey is a retired engineer who drives a Disney World monorail part-time, “for fun, and not for the money.” His generation had lived through all of the fast-forward decades of postwar America. What was his response to the neotraditionalist approach of New Urbanism? Was it regressive, reactionary, and in cahoots with the conservative climate of the times, as some critics have claimed? Pondering the question on his porch one morning—Bailey is one of the town’s most active porch users—he began to describe Celebration as a benevolent “glance back” and not a wholesale “return to the past.” Thinking of a better way to answer the question, he slipped inside the house, retrieved a recent magazine interview with Penelope Leach, British author of the child-care bible Your Baby and Child, and read me her response to a query about the alleged “decline of the family” and the conservative resurrection of family values:

  Have these gentlemen on the right forgotten why this lifestyle vanished? Women didn’t particularly like it: that’s why it came to an end. I don’t know why these people think we can go backward.… Single parents have been used as scapegoats both in your country and mine. Being an “alone” parent is seen as a disgrace and immoral as well—and not just sexually.… The vast majority of single parents don’t fit that description.8

  Soft-spoken and gracious, this was Bailey’s way of pointing out that a literal embrace of the past is a dangerous thing, if and when it hankers for a tim
e when women worked only in the home. But he also believed that the rediscovery of traditions was especially beneficial for those who had long neglected them. Judy Ziffer, a counselor, who had moved from picturesque Mount Dora with her retired doctor husband Al, agreed: “The ‘Me generation’ is a very lonely generation as it grows older.” Referring to Ferdinand Tonnies’s famous distinction between a traditional community of full and open relationships and a dispersed modern society of individuals in partial relationships with each other, she added, “This is a Gemeinschafte and not a Gesellschaft place.” Not everyone would cite a classical German sociologist to illustrate a point, but such views were common among residents with a healthy romantic streak but who never sought to live in a time capsule.

  Advocates of New Urbanism itself, the movement that has most influenced the planning of Celebration, also take exception to the charge of nostalgia. Glowingly feted all across the media, New Urbanism’s panaceas for urban sprawl are being met with increasing approval by local and state planning authorities. They have been adopted by federal agencies like HUD, which has initiated a $2.5 billion New Urbanist public housing program called Hope VI, and they have even won a strong benediction from Al Gore.9 Like the modern movement’s zealous break with Beaux Arts and other historicist traditions, the moral clout of New Urbanism draws on its vigorous opposition to a sworn enemy—conventional suburban development.