ABSTRACT
The establishment of the theme park, and theming itself, as both anti-architecture and as the logical conclusion of the tension between temporal and spatial tropes, formal and social definitions, links postmodern theories of architecture and space to a concrete example. In my previous work on Disney World, I turned to Walter Benjamin—in his posthumous fragments and their distillation in Susan Buck-Morss's Dialectics of Seeing—mapping his analysis of the arcades onto the Disney parks in order to show the complex relationship of mythology, narrative, and memory at work for both children and adults in all of Walt Disney's major theme parks and, indeed, in much of theming itself. Similarly, the buildings in the resort that are supposedly extraneous to the theme parks themselves—office buildings, hotels, and so forth—nevertheless represent not only much new design, but also a new relationship between the Disney corporation and designers outside of the Disney logo. My previous analysis ended with a speculative examination of Disney's plans for Celebration, its first complete suburban town, the recently built Seaside, Florida, and the globalization of Disney resort building, including Tokyo Disneyland, EuroDisney (now Disneyland Paris), and the new All-Star Village to be built at Walt Disney World. As an epilogue to that project, I included a short section as an overview of the changes wrought in the Disney resort empire before and after the death of Walt Disney himself as the parks have become a global reality from the 1980s onward. 1
