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| Disney Springs' Town Center Photo: Miami Herald |
Mall design
has been proceeding under the influence of the Disney parks since the 1960s. Today this legacy has come full circle to the
point that now the malls are leading Imagineering. Industry gossip has it that achieving the look
of Disney Springs’ new Town Center’s been-there-done-that result took working
through at least five design outsourced firms that had, one would hope, less
pedestrian ideas.
Unlike the
careful integration of El Paseo within Santa Barbara’s tradition of stucco and
tile tied into the surrounding streetscape, the new Disney Springs Town Center shows
little sign of understanding where it is or what it’s doing there. By way of contrast, the Town Square opening
onto Main Street in the Magic Kingdom is designed to welcome with icons held in
common through collective memory—the park benches, plantings, firehouse, town
hall, gas lamps, soda fountain, and the charm of historic storefronts featuring
markers for park memories.
For any
industry evolution, the search for quality may ironically lead to settling for
consensus, B-level midrange results.
This is the reason that no matter what the make, cars now look very much
alike. The middle-of-the-curve design
point of mutual mediocrity signals the maturing of any artform. In a way, this midpoint is a mark of quality
because it signals an agreed-upon standard of design performance--one levelled
down from excellence or inspiration.
The mediocre
brand, once accepted, turns into the passing grade for all planning and
execution moves, from cars to cookware, national elections to trade shows,
classroom to casinos, clubs, convenience stores, and experience spaces of all
kinds and purposes.
Experience
designs that used to lead the pack by genius and innovative thinking become,
after decades as models, just the standard of performance, or given a “Marriott-level
finish,” a cringworthy term coined by former Disney chairman Michael Eisner.
Over time,
creative vision seems doomed by the theory of second best.
In
economics, the theory of second best holds that systems work better when all
elements are designed to operate at less than optimal level. Integrated excellence costs more because all parts
of the system can’t keep up with the top-performing aspects, and if and when
these fail, the whole system goes down. Better to maintain everything at an
average or second-rate mode. This is why
very ingenious home design, no matter how brilliant, doesn’t sell on the
housing market. Homeowners are just more
comfortable with trusting the average—for themselves as well as for the future
buyer of their home.
This is also
why any responsible real estate agent will tell you to paint over your custom
color palette with beige, eggshell, or the latest “agreeable gray” found in any
new construction. In order for buyers to
imagine themselves in a new house, the atmosphere must be scrubbed of
personality, including the genius type.
The neutral middling aesthetic is the basis of the home-staging ethic.
And this gives instant insight into consensus taste in home surroundings. Agreeable gray carries the day.
But brilliant
public spaces are not comparative-market residences, nor is “second best” the
quality that made Disney the gold standard for 3-D walkaround design.
When Disney’s
first Imagineers invented the theme park in 1955, they had no model to follow except
the world’s fairs (now expos), and certainly not the amusement park, which Walt
was creating Disneyland to replace.
The
prognosis for amusement parks at that time was dim. Banks and commercial sponsors
had a difficult time building a mental file folder for what Disney was
pitching. There wasn’t one handy. So when we look now at the most popular artform
of the last century - the one that initiated more 3-D design than any since - it’s
difficult to recall that before 1955 no one knew what a theme park was. It was a
journalist from The LA Times, not Disney, who coined the term “theme park”
because there just was no existing term to adequately describe the world’s
leading experience environment. That in
itself is amazing testimony about the state of the art.
Disneyland could
only be defined by what it wasn’t, what people knew at the time—the thrill
park. Six Flags, Cedar Point, Magic
Mountain, et al. are defined by physical thrill-seeking, not the
narrative-image journeys that now define the theme park industry and
increasingly are taking over thrill-seeking in the form of the action story.
Since then, an
entire design industry has grown up and matured around the thematic template,
which still holds its place as the gold standard. To such an extent, ironically, that it has
become difficult to color outside the lines of that mandate: world’s fairs,
expos, malls, resorts, history parks, and museums (last to the theme park
table)–all ideation is ruled by the silent standard of the mega-successful
template: the giga-park prototype.
This isn’t
just a Disney problem, It’s a systemic problem.
As one of our colleagues at a design school put it, “It’s now designers only
talking to designers,” without reference to any wider context. Disney’s context was his young daughters and
their weekly “daddy’s day” outings where Walt sat on a bench on the sidelines to
watch his kids ride the carousel.
He decided that,
in breaking up the American family, this back-seat routine wouldn’t do. As with
his films, starting with animation, he wanted to create a place where
generations could have fun together (now we call it inter-gen experience). And he did just that. He created something rooted
in familiarity, but presented in a way we had never seen – or even thought of --
before.
“Family” now
can include five generations from great-grandparent on down. To succeed, design needs to be
intergenerational, and that means the whole age-development gamut. Disney proved that the family audience could
inspire ingenious solutions, far beyond a bland canvas compromise.
So…calling
something a Town Center doesn’t make it one; people naturally gravitate to a
town center. In Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis without a natural center, it
was the legendary science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury who noted that Disneyland
had become LA’s de facto city center – the one place where everyone meets.
Disney
Springs Town Center is not a town center, and not just because the
psychological center of gravity is closer to the Disney Store. Nor,
unfortunately, is it a Disney Experience. Expensive, and yet nowhere near gold
standard.
Can you make
a town center that not only looks like one but motivates people to treat it as the
town center? Of course, malls have been doing it for decades. It was only a matter of time before a mall
was restyled in the form of the Main Street malls displaced. In 2009 we walked
the streets of Town Square. It’s an upscale, open-air shopping, dining, office,
and entertainment development in Enterprise, Nevada, just outside Las Vegas. It
looks like a well-to-do town center with its mix of architectural styles, but
there is no town there; it serves the surrounding sprawling housing
developments.
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| Las Vegas' Town Square Photo: J.G. O'Boyle |
It was less than two years old when we first saw it, but Town
Square had already become more than just a place to shop. Along with stores and
restaurants, it has three parks that host seventy community events annually,
from all major holidays to open-air movies. And it’s not the only such development, which
is why Disney’s Town Center, however pretty, looks like we’ve seen it all
before, only better. Town Center should have been what we’ve come to expect
from Disney: rooted in familiarity and yet seen through new eyes – inviting,
even inspiring, transporting you to a new and intriguing place you want to
explore. Walt Disney’s genius was building places that tapped into a deep sense
of anemoia in his guests, which means
a nostalgia for a time and place you’ve never actually known.
As for
Disney Springs’ Town Center, we’ve seen it before, we’ve known it for years.
It’s ordinary, uninspiring, intimidating, and surprisingly unwelcoming – and
that does not bode well for the future of theme park design. Somehow design
ideation needs to start pushing beyond what used to be “good enough.”
