The Architecture of Staged RealitiesThe Architecture of Staged Realities

In this essay, Léa-Catherine Szacka explores the long and fascinating history of Main Street USA as architectural fantasy - from Disneyland to social media.

In the conclusion of his 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi famously proclaimed: "...is not Main Street almost all right?"Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: MoMA, 1966 (reedition 2020)), 102. Venturi's statement, now a staple of late 20th-century architecture, was intended to lend legitimacy to the chaotic and commercial scenery of the ugly and the ordinary, arguing that: "The seemingly chaotic juxtapositions of honky-tonk elements express an intriguing kind of vitality and validity, and they produce an unexpected approach to unity as well."_ Ibid_. A few years later, Main Street, and more particularly the Las Vegas Strip, became the focus of Venturi's second book, Learning from Las Vegas - published in 1972 with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour - a radical and unexpected "call to look at the vulgar and disdained everyday landscape of a typical Main Street, USA."Aaron Betsky, 'Learning from Robert Venturi', Architect, 20 September 2018, < https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/learning-from-robert-venturi_o>, [consulted 2 September 2021].

Main Street has a long and fascinating history. As a space of presentation "where community could gather, shop and do business,"Mark Gillem, "Make-Believe Main Streets: Hyperreality and the Lifestyle Center", Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review , Spring 2009, Vol. 20, No. 2, 15. it encapsulates both the utterly real and the most illusory of architecture. Equally paramount as a representational stage, Main Street is a picturesque and fragmented streetscape composed of a collage of individual elements, or façades, that together act as a frame that delimits a civic and highly performative open space. In the context of an exhibition about Walt Disney's ideology, design and current influence, questioning the sense and place of Main Street's taste for nostalgia and performativity also becomes a way of outlining the recent history of architecture and its representation.

Starting from an exploration of the model of Disney's Main Street USA as an architectural locus of illusion, this essay expands on other examples of architecture of staged realities, in order to question how, since the mid 1950s, architects have deployed the make-believe potential of Potemkin village and the communicative power of architectural façades as a way to explore the thin line between authenticity and fiction.

Walt Disney was an expert in the art of turning dreams into reality. A firm believer in the role of the imagination as the model on which reality was built, he opened, on 17 July 1955, the first Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, Southern California.

The initiative was soon followed by a series of other similar theme parks in Florida, Tokyo, Paris, and so on. Yet, all the different "themed lands" of most Disneyland Parks around the world share a common point of entry through which every visitor to Disneyland must pass: Main Street USA, a make-believe space that resembles the main street of an idealised turn-of-the-20th-century American town. A space of reassurance and control, Main Street USA offers a perspective on the vista of the Sleeping Beauty Castle, located at the end of the street. Both a strip mall and a slightly-larger-than-normal model train layout, Main Street USA is the space that, literally, and metaphorically "transports" the visitors from reality to imagination, from the "real-world" to the dream world of Fantasyland.

Disneyland is an immense and displaced metaphor for the system of representations and values unique to American society. As is well documented, Main Street U.S.A., one of America's most popular and idealized images, and the key symbol of American culture, harks back to the model of Fort Collins, Colorado and Marceline, Missouri, Walt Disney's boyhood home. A space of nostalgia and optimism, Main Street USA is harmoniously decorated and brightly coloured: it is a gentle fakery of style that "soothes and reassures the visitors."Karal Ann Marling, "Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks" in Karal Ann Marling (Ed.) Designing Disney's Theme Parks (Paris/New York: Flammarion and Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1997), 79. Its array of old-fashioned storefronts (the opera house, the ice cream parlour, the emporium, the toy shop, the drugstore, the restaurant, and so on) give the illusion of an idealised and picturesque past while clearly pursuing an ideological function. But, as explained by philosopher Louis Marin, Main Street U.S.A. is also a form of distorted and phantasmatic representation of daily life meant to alienate the visitors: "by a fascinating image of the past and the future, of what is estranged and what is familiar: comfort, welfare, consumption, scientific and technological progress, superpower, and morality."Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play (Atlantic City: Humanities Press, 1984), 240.

Main Street USA is a space of illusion that makes shopping wonderful and pleasant at the same time. Like in a Potemkin village, its 600-foot-long strip of fake Victorian façades conceals its true condition: a series of shop fronts, most of which hide real stores selling real merchandise.

As Umberto Eco puts it in his famous essay "Travels in Hyperreality", "The Main Street façades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing."Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 43. And it is this constant tension between reality and fiction that turns consumption into a phantasmagorical experience.

Media also played an important role in turning Disney's dream into reality. Indeed, Disneyland's Main Street was mediated through the television screen, much before it was directly experienced. Walt Disney saw an opportunity in the new medium and cleverly used television to create desire and, therefore, draw visitors to his theme park. From October 1954, the weekly series Walt Disney's Disneyland was broadcasted weekly on the ABC network - one of the Big ThreeThe three major traditional commercial broadcast television networks in the United States: CBS, NBC, and ABC- who had cut a deal with DisneyJanet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (London: Polity. ress, 2001), 83. The show provided the financial backing necessary to complete the Anaheim project. In addition, it functioned as a wonderful promotional vehicle for the park, explaining Walt Disney's dream to potential ticket buyers even before the park opened. Television was really the start of Disneyland, letting the broadcast image precede the experience.

It is therefore not surprising that Main Street USA is often interpreted as one big stage set (made mostly of fibreglass), "an imaginary world scripted like a movie or TV show in which the visitor is an actor."Robert Neuman, "Disneyland's Main Street, USA, and its source in Hollywood, USA.", The Journal of American Culture. 31:1, 2008, 83.

Like a set, Main Street is a fragmentary space where what counts is only what will be framed by the camera.

Always slightly smaller than in real life, the scale of the façades decreases with each successive floor, creating the illusion of greater height. Painted in pastel colours to enhance the sense of fantasy, Main Street's façades accentuate the feeling of a toy-like, unreal place.

Interestingly, when Walt Disney decided to build Disneyland there were no architects or amusement-park designers on the board of his company. In a 1972 piece for The New York Times Magazine, architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Disney, who had never much liked the idea of hiring external consultants, "put together a design team himself, composed mostly of art directors from the Disney Studios, and called the group WED, after his initials."_Ibid. _But, by a strange reversal of value between fiction and reality, in the 1970s, the work of the WED group became an inspiration for rising postmodern architects. Indeed, according to Goldberger, the trip to Disneyland became, by then, "the sort of obligatory pilgrimage for young architects that visits to the great monuments of Europe were for earlier generations."Ibid. Ultimately, in the late 1980s early 1990s, CEO of Walt Disney company and architecture and design amateur Michael Eisner hired a few of these postmodern architects - Robert A.M. Stern, Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moore, Arata Isozaki - to design a series of spectacular headquarters and hotels for Disney.For example, the Orlando headquarters of Disney, designed by Arata Isozaki; the Disney's Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, designed by Michael Graves; the Disney Corporation Headquarters building in California also by Michael Graves.

Although not designed by architects, Disney's Main Street U.S.A. can be interpreted as a form of architectural "degenerated utopia", an ideology changed into the form of a myth, or collective fantasy, to quote Marin.Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play (Atlantic City: Humanities Press, 1984), 239-240. In _Collage City _(1978), Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter develop an interesting parallel between another utopia, Superstudio's world as abstract cartesian grid, and Disney World "symbolic American utopia" of Main Street U.S.A. For them, the Superstudio's landscapes and the Disney street are contradictory and complementary visions supported by "the exigencies of freedom (no imposition of authority)"Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT. Press, 1978), 42. which "presents itself as 'real' or 'imaginary' according to taste."Ibid. 44. Indeed, while one proposes a non-oppressive egalitarianism and an "ideally uniform stage for spontaneous happening" the other offers a "commercial exploitation" of the needs of just such a stage."Ibid. 43-44.

The most famous Main Street of recent architectural history was the Strada Novissima, the legendary 70-metre-long staged display built inside the Corderie dell'Arsenale di Venezia for the 1980 Architecture Biennale.

Composed of 20 representational façades designed by the most prominent architects of the time - ten on each side of the street - the Strada Novissima was modelled on both the archetype of the Strada Nuova and the architecture of fairgrounds. It celebrated a new form of façadism that, like Disney's architecture, was hiding the commercial logic behind it. Built like a set - by the technicians of the Roman cinema studio Cinecitta - the Strada Novissima was mainly a space of illusion for the plurality of individual architectural expressions flourishing at the time.

What was particularly striking about that unconventional exhibition format was its insistence on the competitiveness of the row of façades, as well as its promotion of architecture as image. Strada Novissima means "the very new street", a name derived from the Strada Nuova, a distinctively new type of urban space that first appeared in 16th-century Genoa.George L. Gorse, " A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility: The Strada Nuova and Sixteenth-Century Genoa", The Art Bulletin , Jun., 1997, Vol. 79, No. 2, 301. A residential palace-street or linear piazza, the Strada Nuova was designed to "legitimise and enhance the authority of a ruling elite."_Ibid. _ A classical stage-like space for the old nobility, it provided ruling families with the opportunity to impress during promenades and ceremonies, showing off their wealth and power through the design of their palace, and primarily its rhetorical façade on the street. In the early 17th century, Peter Paul Ruben's famous Palazzi di Genova represented the Strada Nuova in length as a classical scaena frons (scenic front), insisting on the power of the sole elevation façade. The Strada Nuova, and Ruben's representation of it, were a direct translation of the spirit of the Baroque period, an era during which stage design and town planning shared a close relationshipJonathan Richards, Facadism. (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), 25..

The other mythical origin of the Strada Novissima is curator Paolo Portoghesi's visit to Berlin's Alexanderplatz Christmas market, in December 1979. Portoghesi often repeated that the idea for the street of façades first came at the sight of this typical German market. This, of course, reinforces the commercial aspect of the exhibition, which also played an important role in the reduction of architecture to images and artefacts with associated market value. As recalled by Silvia Lavin, in the postmodern era, this "ever more pervasive image culture" came with a process of dematerialisation that "turn things once of use-value into commodities to be sold."Silvia Lavin, Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths (Leipzig: Spector Book, 2018), 37. While Phyllis Lambert was building an impressive architecture collection in Montreal and Max Protecth was boosting the market for architectural drawings in New York, Henrich Klotz, who was travelling across Europe in search of drawings and models that could enter the fundtheto add to the collection of the new German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt, reportedly went shopping on Venice's ephemeral Strada.For more on the rise of the market for architectural drawings and models in the late 1970s early 1980s see Jordan Kauffman, Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970-1990 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018); Arch+ 26: The Klotz Tapes, Verlag, 2014; Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka (Eds.) Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Beyond their commercial logic, both Disney's Main Street and the Biennale's Strada Novissima were paradigmatic examples of architectural façadism, an approach where the elevation is designed as a component in a larger streetscape, and not necessarily as an expression of the building behind.

In the postmodern era, façades have often relied on architectural languages of the past while exacerbating the divorce between the interior and exterior of buildings. Therefore, like in Disneyland's main street, the façades of postmodern streets were a form of architectural scenery designed to please clients who wanted to project a particular image.Jonathan Richards, Facadism, 27.

Postmodern architecture's taste for nostalgia often produced simulacra, what philosopher Jean Baudrillard defines as copies without originals, or for which originals no longer exist.

"When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality - a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us - a strategy of the real, of the neo-real and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence."Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press, 1995 (original 1981).

According to Baudrillard, Disneyland is the paradigmatic example of hyperreality: presented as imaginary, it wants to make us believe that the rest is real. He argues, however, that in fact Los Angeles and the "America that surrounds it are no longer real but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation."Ibid.

A good example of an architecture of simulacra is Seaside Florida, a privately owned town and one of the first communities in America designed on the principles of New Urbanism, a school of town planning that seeks to return to the small town, community-based ethos of the 1950s. Realised between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, Seaside Florida was designed by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk - a husband and wife team from the prestigious architectural firm ArquitectonicaThe firm is famous for its design of the Atlantis, the 20-story slab luxury condominium apartment building built between 1980 and 1982 that claim to fame when it featured on the opening credits of the television series "Miami Vice." - with European classicist and town planner Léon Krier. Its neo-traditional pastel beach houses with white picket fences include works by many protagonists of the postmodern scene such as Robert A.M. Stern, Aldo Rossi and Steven Holl. They embody the kind of fake perfection you expect to find on Main Street USA. In stark counterpoint to suburban sprawl and the re-awakening of the American city, Seaside Florida was based on the idea of placemaking. It aimed to create a haven for those who missed the communities that were developed when cars were not the dominant means of transport. Its principles state that a small coastal community as well as a walkable, connected, mixed-use community will yield a better quality of life.

Seaside Florida also served as a set for the 1998 film The Truman Show, in which an average man's life turned out to be the subject of a reality TV show. The real town of Seaside Florida thus turned into the set of a reality show, in a fictional movie. And, through The Truman Show, as it was hard to distinguish between reality and make-believe architecture

Seaside Florida became merely an image that talks back to architecture, producing a form of feedback loop between broadcasting and architecture, one in which the performativity of the place itself becomes a pull factor for tourism.

Another famous example of placemaking through the screen and the communicative power of cable television is the story of Coronation Street, a purely imaginary place that became the most famous street in England. In June 1960, the independent television station Granada Television started to air the soap opera Coronation Street (or Corrie), which became the most watched and longest lasting programme in the history of British television. The dramatic action of Coronation Street is centred on a small cobbled terraced street meant to be located in Weatherfields, a fictional town in the north of England, distant from the political and cultural epicentre of London. The set of Coronation Street, now located in Manchester's media city, is a prime tourist attraction: it offers visitors a sense of authenticity and the feeling of "being there" - that original promise of broadcasting.Steffan Ericson and Kristina Riegert (Eds.), Media Houses: Architecture, Media and the Production of Centrality (New York/Washinton D.C.: Peter Lang, 2010), 49. On Coronation Street, like on Main Street USA, reality is a set. Unlike Benjamin's thesis on the loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, television turns fiction into reality, and by visiting the set one can get closer to the aura of the place.Ibid and Nick Couldry, The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (London: Routledge, 2000), 105.

Ideas of placemaking and performativity were at the core of both the architecture of Disneyland's Main Street USA and the postmodern architecture of the Strada Novissima: visitors strolling down these streets of façades were the true actors in the scene, and their interaction in a civic space was what gave richness to the place. Nostalgia and collective memory, recognisable architectural elements of an idealised past, pastel colours and a distorted scale, reinforced the feeling of belonging and the sense of social and cultural relevance.

Today, although historicism no longer predominates in our architectural landscape, I would argue that contemporary architecture owes some of its features to these architectures of illusion.

This new architecture of illusion involves a renewed performative potential of the façade, creating an architecture the primary purpose of which seems to be the creation of a sense of identity - identity of the self and identity of the place - through forms of representation. It is the case, for example, of the nearly completed (November 2021) 61.5 Million euros MVRDV-designed project for the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen standing right opposite Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. The building is a 39.5m-high bowl-shaped structure designed to house the future archives of the museum. 1,664 curved mirrored glass panels produce a façade that creates a dazzling effect by multiplying the surrounding environment, making it look slightly unreal. Already nicked-named "the flowerpot", the building will certainly attract plenty of media attention. As such, it will succeed in one of its main objectives. Beyond its function as an art depot, it is intended to boost the city's economy by increasing the visitor numbers of the museum.

In the ever-growing race for performativity, Disney's architecture of illusion is reinterpreted and implemented by contemporary architecture.

Obviously, the trick is not new. We can think of many structures, large and small, that have previously combined mirrored panels and curved shapes to create similar architectural feedback loops: Paris' 1985 Géode, a giant steel globe, 36m in diameter, built by Adrien Fainsilber stands in the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie and reflects the sky and the Parc de la Villette; Chicago's Cloud Gate, the public sculpture erected in the early 2000s by Indian-born British artist Sir Anish Kapoor is the centrepiece of AT&T Plaza at Millenium Park; and, even before that, Norman Foster's headquarters of the insurance company Willies Faber & Dumas completed in 1975 in the city of Ipswich, northeast of London. Interestingly, Charles Jencks, in the first edition of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), published a black-and-white double spread image (the largest illustration in the entire book) of Foster's building. Covered in dark tinted solid glass panels, the building was often referred to as the "big black piano" or the "Rolls Royce." The extended caption accompanying the image reads: The building curves around the site, takes up the street lines and reflects the surrounding environment in fragments."

But, in the case of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, the reflection of the surrounding environment also brought controversy. The building being next to the Erasmus Medical Centre's children's section - including the department of child psychiatry - concerns were raised as to the effect of the building on its surroundings. The Medical Centre spokesperson claimed that the mirrored façade would expose the children to the public eye, while also creating confusion by exposing them to too many stimulants. The adopted solution was to mattify a section of the building's reflective façade.

Today, if imagination still shapes reality, the world of illusion is no longer controlled by Walt Disney, but by another big capitalist corporation: Facebook (also owner of Instagram). Constantly shifting boundaries between real and simulacra, social media platforms have a strong influence on our contemporary built environment.

As desires and dreams are shaped by the circulation of flattened and often fragmentary images, the ruling elites pushed building's performativity to the extreme in order to gain a place on the global main street.

Léa-Catherine Szacka is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at University of Manchester and member of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG). Her work focuses on the history of architecture exhibitions, the history and theory of postmodern architecture, and, more broadly, the relationship between media, architecture and politics since the 1970s.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press, 1995 (original 1981).

Aaron Betsky, 'Learning from Robert Venturi', Architect, 20 September 2018.

Nick Couldry, The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (London: Routledge, 2000).

Umberto Eco, _Travels in Hyperreality _(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Steffan Ericson and Kristina Riegert (Eds.), Media Houses: Architecture, Media and the Production of Centrality (New York/Washinton D.C.: Peter Lang, 2010).

Mark Gillem, "Make-Believe Main Streets: Hyperreality and the Lifestyle Center", Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Spring 2009, Vol. 20, No. 2, 15.

George L. Gorse, 'A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility: The Strada Nuova and Sixteenth-Century Genoa', The Art Bulletin, Jun., 1997, Vol. 79, 301-327.

Paul Goldberger, 'Mickey Mouse Teaches the Architects', New York Times Magazine, 22 October 1972.

Jordan Kauffman, Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines, 1970-1990 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).

Silvia Lavin, Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths (Leipzig: Spector Book, 2018).

Linde B. Lehtinen, 'The haunting artifice of fake villages around the world', CNN Style, 27 March, 2018.

Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play (Atlantic City: Humanities Press, 1984).

Karal Ann Marling (Ed.) _Designing Disney's Theme Parks _(Paris/New York: Flammarion and Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1997).

Robert Neuman, 'Disneyland's Main Street, USA, and its source in Hollywood, USA', The Journal of American Culture. 31:1, 2008.

Véronique Patteeuw and Léa-Catherine Szacka (Eds.) Mediated Messages: Periodicals, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Postmodern Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Jonathan Richards, Facadism. (London/New York: Routledge, 1994).

Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT. Press, 1978).

Michael Sorkin (Ed.) Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. (New York: Hill&Wang, 1992).

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: MoMA, 1966 (reedition 2020)).

Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (London: Polity. ress, 2001).

Arch+ 26: The Klotz Tapes, Verlag, 2014.