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Celebration, Florida
You can imagine all the factions that form around high ticket attractions
When you think Orlando, you think first of theme parks and not architecture. I’m not even sure architecture would make a “top 50 things you think about when you think about Orlando” list, which would probably be filled with words like Mickey, fun, fireworks and hot. Still, you don’t have to go all the way to Lakeland to see architecture if you want to. “ET 104 Celebration: New Urbanism 20 Years Later” took us to Celebration, just like it promised. And while the town is all about new urbanism, the office buildings at Celebration Place are all about suburbanism. Designed by Aldo Rossi, the buildings are really quite nice for a suburban office park (which they are), far away from the walkable parts of town and surrounded by roads, parking lots and sprawl.
I always understood that Celebration was a “New Urbanism” style town on Disney property that was designed and controlled by Disney. The truth is that the property was owned by Disney but since has been removed from the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the legal government of Walt Disney World. Disney realized that if they kept Celebration in the district, then its residents could vote there and, well, Disney sure as hell doesn’t want that to happen. And they don’t own it, but they do still control it in terms of design requirements. Something which in the end is probably a good idea since a lot of the developer built buildings are falling apart, there are lots of lawsuits and areas with closed off, braced balconies that we saw on the tour.
Putting all of that aside, the town is actually quite nice, with lots of walkable areas, a downtown with some buildings by famous architects (Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli, Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown), and the design requirements feel less oppressive than Seaside and varied enough to feel more like a town. It’s also pretty small and very isolated- only about 7,000 people live there. In order to operate a small business or restaurant, you need a population of about 20,000 to 30,000 people, and while the greater area has well more than that, downtown Celebration is hard to find. Already the movie theatre was closed and on a beautiful weekend afternoon, only a handful of people could be seen downtown.
If you don’t count Celebration, I was lucky enough to book both of the only two good Disney tours that the AIA offered. The first one was “ET 120 From Storyline to Immersive Environment: Disney's Animal Kingdom,” and it was a Disney Imagineer led tour through Animal Kingdom, a Disney theme park all about animals. In three short hours we walked the entire park and learned in depth about why and how design decisions were made, while the Disney Imagineers pointed out design details and told stories about the construction of the park.
The tour ended at a construction site where the new Avatar themed area was close to being finished- although there are a lot of punchlist items left to be picked up. They asked us not to take pictures because it was not yet public, which is why you don’t see any pictures of mostly completed flying mountains (which they told us how they were structurally supported) or weird ass fake glowing plants. A great end to a really wonderful and special AIA tour experience.
The other of the only two good Disney tours that the AIA offered was “ET 110 Beyond Backstage: How Architects Help the Magic Kingdom to Remain the Most Magical Place on Earth.” If the Animal Kingdom was a design tour led by Imagineers (and it was), this tour was more of an operational tour led by the Disney facilities department.
The tour started with our bus dropping us off at a parking lot behind Main Street on the Tomorrowland side, where we visited some of their offices on the second floor of Main Street before heading underground into the Utilidor system. This is a series of tunnels that connect various points in the park, where cast members visit the costume shop or have lunch and then magically appear in Adventureland wearing a safari hat dressed as Chip or Dale. The Utilidor tunnel system was an expensive add on requirement by Walt, who hated that at Disneyland in California you could see characters headed to work and walking through front of house areas where they didn’t thematically belong.
Life in the Utilidor is not pretty- it is utilitarian after all- but the tour of it (where they nicely asked us not to take pictures) was fascinating, and they took the time to talk about how all the systems worked and all of the maintenance and improvements required to keep everything always running so smoothly. And while we spent most of our time underground, a front of house highlight was a visit to here, Cinderella Castle Dream Suite, 100 feet above the park and a place not all that easy to get into.
The Cinderella Castle Dream Suite is, of course. in Cinderella Castle, high above the park. It’s construction costs were outrageous- everything was custom and it is not that easy of a space to work inside. And while it is far and away the most expensive hotel room built out of the 30,000 or so available on property, it’s also the cheapest. You can’t actually pay for this room, Disney reserves it for contest winners (and occasional VIPs), all who get a chance to sleep inside the castle and look outside and through the stained glass windows, likely seeing all sorts of overnight maintenance crews scurrying about in Fantasyland below.
The Hilton at the Orlando Convention Center was fine, although during all the time I was there, I never actually got to see the view outside my high floor window during daylight hours. My initial flight arrived hours late, and then every convention day started too early and ended too late for me, and it was too long of a walk from the convention center to consider a midday hotel break, even in the rare case when I had an hour or two free. AIA Conventions can be exhausting, although obviously my pain here is self chosen. If I didn’t book so many tours and make so many plans then maybe my time might have been a little more free.
After the convention and all of its tours ended, I still found myself in Orlando with a few extra days to kill and immediately headed to a better located hotel. I chose to stay at the Walt Disney Swan for two reasons. The first is location- it is a short boat ride or walk (I’ll always choose the walk) to Hollywood Studios Park or to the back door of Epcot. And the second reason is the buildings themselves. The Swan and Dolphin were designed by New Jersey architect Michael Graves and may be his most Graves-ian buildings. I am not the biggest fan of Post Modernism as a movement, but the buildings create this perfect, immersive world where giant swans and shells on top of buildings somehow seems like the right thing to do.
I have been to Orlando a lot, even if you only count visits there as an adult, but I had yet to visit Universal Studios. Not because I didn’t think it would be fun, but more because I usually stay on Disney property, which comes with all sorts of incentives to stay on property. What was interesting about visiting Universal wasn’t their city walk (the one in California is more focused and honestly nicer) or the rides (although the waiting line at the Simpsons ride was fun) but rather their new. totally immersive Harry Potter experience. It’s the immersiveness that really impresses you the most. First off, you’re surrounded by buildings on all sides, and then every detail and every store and every employee in every store totally sell the experience. More fun than it should be.
I didn’t have all that much extra time at Disney, but I did buy a three day pass with a park hopper option that allowed me to go from park to park to park like a crazy person, regardless of the crowds, the blazing heat or the various Mary Poppins that got in my way.
We’re closing out A’17 (or the 2017 AIA Convention) with some last pictures of Disney from when I went from park to park to park like a crazy person. I had low expectations of Orlando going in, and knew a lot of other architects who skipped this year claiming that there was nothing to see but Disney parks anyway. In retrospect, it was one of the better conventions with some really great tours and, at the end, I got to go to Disney World. Possibly this might have been the best convention ever come to think of it.
But wait, there’s more
I go to these AIA Conventions almost every year, meaning that there’s lots of slideshows and pictures and stories from all sorts of different cities, showing off their best architecture and design for all to see.
