Look, Mickey, No Kitsch!

By KURT ANDERSEN

As architects began rediscovering the virtues of color and history and whimsy a decade ago, the buildings that resulted were often derided as cartoonish exercises in kitschy nostalgia. Disneyesque became a standard pejorative applied to the work of such post-Modernists as Michael Graves and Robert A.M. Stern. Now, rather suddenly, the figure of speech is biting back: under chairman Michael Eisner, Disney has become the premiere patron of architecture of the late 20th century, commissioning major works by a majority of the world's most celebrated architects.

Disneyites occupy a zany new Neoclassical corporate headquarters that Graves designed in Burbank, Calif. (the Seven Dwarfs, each cast 19 ft. tall in concrete, support the pediment). In December the first guests checked into Stern's two ersatz-turn-of-the-century hotels at Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, outside Orlando. May marked the opening of the most interesting of the Disney architecture, an administration building in Lake Buena Vista by Arata Isozaki. And at Euro Disney outside Paris, where a $4.1 billion theme park and resort will open next spring, buildings designed by Graves, Stern, Frank Gehry and Antoine Predock are all under construction.

Eisner's rationale for hiring practically every famous architect on earth is complicated: part corporate imagemaking, part personal enthusiasm and part a natural extension of the new Disney self-confident show-biz relentlessness. And there is some enlightened despotism thrown in. "It costs the same to do well as badly," Eisner claims. "It's exactly the same price if you build 1,200 ugly rooms."

Shortly after arriving at Disney in 1984, Eisner had his first working dinner with some of the company's executives and offhandedly suggested they build a hotel in the shape of Mickey Mouse. They were shocked -- and galvanized. But some of the Old Guard was not amused. Ground had already been broken at Epcot for a new hotel complex, and Disney's partner in the project was determined to hire a conventional architect to create a conventionally upscale hotel -- a meretricious riot of Trumpian brass and glass. Eisner, however, wanted Graves, at the time the hottest architect in the country, to design the 758-room Swan and the 1,514-room Dolphin. "I said, 'Look, we're an entertainment company.' " Eisner got his architect, and the Disney adventure in big-time, high-profile design had begun.

"We're Disney. We've got to have the biggest, the best, the most tasteful," says Eisner. Most tasteful is a new Disney superlative, yet taste and aesthetic surprise and a certain rigor are what make the recent architectural fantasies more than Vegas kitsch or shopping-mall saccharine.

* Disney has a reputation among architects (as among filmmakers) for tightfistedness and micromanagement. On each project Eisner is brought in five times to review the plans, approving masonry textures, paint colors and light fixtures. One reason the chairman says he meddles more in the design of a hotel than he does, for instance, in the production of The Marrying Man is that "movies go away, but buildings stand as monuments to your bad taste." Plus he thinks he's good at inspiring architects. "I know how to make creative people see that something is not as good as they can do. Or I tell architects, 'Don't give up. Don't accommodate.' "

Eisner is ambitious in the best sense. Like the founder of his company, or an overgrown child, he thinks big and will not take no for an answer. He wants to redeem Walt Disney's dream for Epcot -- it was supposed to be an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow -- by creating a new town on 3,800 acres at the southern end of his Florida fiefdom. Eisner's vision is a mixture of the predictable ("the biggest mall in Florida"), the high-minded ("I've been obsessed with creating a new chautauqua") and the intriguingly original ("We want to build workplaces, pilot factories"). He has already rejected schemes by Stern and Gwathmey Siegel. A design competition going on among Helmut Jahn, Charles Moore, Aldo Rossi and the firms Arquitectonica, Morphosis and Kohn Pedersen Fox has so far produced accepted designs by Jahn, Moore and Rossi. Trying to realize this biggest dream has been "a nightmare," Eisner says. He doesn't know exactly what he wants, but he wants it to be amazing, and he wants it badly.