It seems fitting that in a California desert town called Rancho Mirage, an unlikely fantasy world should emerge from the parched sandy soil. At the star-studded intersection of Frank Sinatra Drive and Bob Hope Drive — named after two Hollywood celebrities who frequented the area’s exclusive country clubs — a billboard heralds the arrival of Cotino, a “Storyliving by Disney community.” In this square mile of desert near Palm Springs there will soon be a shiny new world of 2,000 homes arranged around a sparkling turquoise lake, where every aspect of life will be curated by the entertainment company.
Cotino offers superfans a place where they can make their wildest dreams come true; a chance to live in a Disney movie “where the story is all about you.” It will feature a clubhouse inspired by the futuristic mansion from Incredibles 2, where neighbors can meet for Disney-themed art classes, enjoy dinners inspired by Disney stories and participate in family days with Disney-related activities.
Thanks to patented Crystal Lagoons technology, the lake will maintain an unnatural shade of Avatar blue all year round
The themed homes, which will start at a cost of over a million dollars (792,000 euros), promise to be “infused with the company’s special magic,” while there will be a city center with a street market where local artists will showcase art and crafts. will sell with a Disney theme. crafts, will be “abundant with opportunities for laughter.” The 24-hectare lake – a bold proposal for an area suffering from extreme drought – will remain an unnatural shade of Avatar blue all year round, thanks to patented Crystal Lagoons technology. Cotino seems as close as possible to life at Disneyland itself, with every detail honed by Disney Imagineers, every service provided by Disney “cast members” (i.e. staff).
Launching in 2022 and with an additional 4,000 homes in North Carolina on the way, Storyliving by Disney represents the latest chapter in the world’s largest entertainment company’s off-screen expansion. It’s a centuries-long story brought to life in an eye-opening new exhibition at the Arc en Rêve center for architecture in Bordeaux, France, which charts how Disney went from making flickering animations of a talking mouse to sprinkling his theme fairy. material about every aspect of our lives. The company’s $180 billion portfolio now includes film production, cable and streaming channels, theme parks, cruise ship vacations, golf courses, theater productions, safari expeditions, music publishing, an airline and even its own snorkeling island in the Bahamas. a fake shipwreck.
With theatrical and streaming revenues down in recent years, revenues from Disney’s “experience” division are soaring, and real estate development is the next logical step. Disney tried it before in Florida, first with utopian plans for Epcot (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), followed by the picturesque town of Celebration, but Storyliving takes the branded living experience to the next level. It is calibrated to capitalize on loyal fans’ emotional attachment to the House of Mouse when they make the most expensive purchase of their lives, while creating a captive audience that can leverage brand services in perpetuity.
As Amy Young, Cotino’s creative director, says in a promotional video, “You don’t see a lot of new home communities that people have a real emotional connection with, and we thought, ‘We have a real emotional connection with our guests. .’” It’s clearly enough of an emotional connection to make residents cough up $20,000 to join Cotino’s neighborhood club, and then $10,000 a year for the rest of their merry theme life.
The exhibition at Arc en Rêve, entitled The Architecture of Staged Realities, paints a portrait of Walt Disney as a born developer, a cartoonist who understood not only how to attract people to his magical worlds, but also how to keep them coming back come. It is as much a story about human psychology as it is about architecture and design, with Walt calling himself the fatherly wizard of happiness. As the exhibition’s curator, Saskia van Stein, puts it: “His most important medium was the American psyche.” And boy, did he know how to exploit it?
Disneyland occupies a central place in the story, as the first physical manifestation of Walt’s cartoon universe. Just as the modern Disney business is built on cross-promotion—with movies pushing consumers toward themed attractions and merchandise, and vice versa—Walt also realized the importance of television to the success of his planned theme park. In the 1950s, he made a deal with television network ABC to invest in the purchase of 244 acres of land around Anaheim, California. In return for his investment, Disney himself would host a weekly TV show for the network, telling stories about technological advancements and alternate realities – and most importantly, educating viewers about the process of building Disneyland.
“It will be a place of hopes and dreams, facts and fantasy all in one,” he declared in the first episode as he pored over maps and models, introducing viewers to the nostalgic Wild West of Frontierland; the futuristic utopia of Tomorrowland; and the pink Fantasyland, home to “everything your heart desires”. More than half of all TV owners in the US tuned in, introducing an enthusiastic audience of more than 28 million people to Disney. It was a stroke of marketing genius: by the time visitors arrived at Disneyland, they were already familiar with it, having seen the plans evolve on their screens, creating the intoxicating excitement of meeting a celebrity in real life.
The exhibition shows how brand partnerships were a key weapon in Disney’s promotional arsenal, starting with the Monsanto House of the Future, one of Tomorrowland’s main attractions in the 1950s and 1960s. A cluster of cantilevered capsules made of reinforced plastic. This was a sci-fi anthem about the possibilities of plastic, featuring a dishwasher, a microwave, a two-way camera for video calls, plastic tableware and an electric toothbrush – all long before their widespread acceptance in suburban homes.
By bringing film scenery into the built environment, Van Stein reveals how visual tricks are used in Disney’s parks, such as the use of ‘Go Away Green’, a patented shade of colorless olive green that is used to make things disappear. It is used to color everything from lampposts to fences and speakers – as well as the concrete foundation of the now-demolished Monsanto house. Meanwhile, “Blending Blue” is used to disguise unsightly higher structures.
Scale is also an important part of the illusion, with the floors of buildings getting shorter and shorter as they get taller – at a scale of 5/8 above the ground floor, and then at a scale of half above that – making the worlds cute and feel “pony size”. as Walt put it. He also took sly poetic license with features such as the American flags found throughout the parks – each flag missing a star or a stripe, allowing them to evade the usual rules that govern the daily raising and lowering of the Stars and Stripes.
Another innovation – which came to influence today’s smart cities – was utilidors, a vast network of underground service corridors that connected the various themed lands at Disney World in Florida. They were introduced after Walt was bothered by the sight of a cowboy walking through Tomorrowland on his way to his post in Frontierland in the Californian park, which Walt said destroyed the illusion.
The tunnels housed automated vacuum waste disposal, concealed deliveries, costume areas for cast members, kitchens and emergency services, and provided an ‘understage’ lair for the theaters above. As the New York Times architecture critic basked after a visit in the 1970s, Florida’s Disney World boasted “an array of technical innovations that would make any city manager salivate,” making it “arguably the most important laboratory for urban planning in the United States.” is.
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Since the exhibition is being staged in France, the exhibition has a section dedicated to Disneyland Paris and the surrounding suburban developments that emerged from it. After a long and hard-fought battle between several European countries in the 1980s to host this hallowed outpost of American culture, France got the prize—and had to cough up more than four times the amount Disney had put up for the privilege. The project was described in the French press at the time as a ‘cultural Chernobyl’, with the park seen as destroying much of the prime agricultural land. The gift that Disney boss Michael Eisner presented to the future president of France, Jacques Chirac, also did not bode well: an original painted animated celluloid of the Evil Queen offering Snow White a poisoned apple.
The exhibition documents the ongoing development of Val d’Europe, a new Disney-themed town near the park, created after a 1987 agreement gave the company unprecedented control over urban development codes over nearly 5,000 hectares of surrounding land. The result is a surreal series of Florida-style gated communities, done up in French costume, with clusters of inflated Hausmannian wedding cakes popping up in the fields of Marne-la-Vallée. Poignant photographs by Eléa Godefroy, taken while walking along the edge of the Disney property, document how these surreal enclaves sit within the surrounding countryside. Every year they nibble away a little more land as the happiest place on earth expands around the world.
• The Architecture of Staged Realities can be seen until October 6 at Arc en Rêve, Bordeaux