SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ If you were going to tell me about your exhibition The Architecture of Staged Realities at arc en rêve — but without getting into Disney itself, its legacy, the cartoons — could you do that?

SASKIA VAN STEIN That's a challenging task… Of course, it would be about storytelling: how storytelling is fundamental for us to have a sense of belonging, a sense of recognition and of community. The identities we draw upon are informed by the stories that we tell each other, so stories are not innocent. If we look at mythology, folklore, or even indigenous belief systems, the stories we tell each other inform how we see ourselves, our communities and our surroundings, and that's about reciprocity.

Architecture and the cities we live in are consolidated stories. They represent the thoughts of a designer that had an ambition, a particular zeitgeist that they wanted to reveal or mirror or share through a particular kind of materiality. That means that we can question our understanding of reality, and maybe material integrity through the lens of our surroundings.

KOOZ That was beautifully done. I was wondering how you'd get around the central figure of Walt Disney, to the force of his imagination —

SVS What I found with the original ‘Walt’ is that he understood that “imagination creates (my) reality,” which is one of his quotes — and moreover, he felt the liberty to build it, and to tinker with all of that. For him to forge his own birth certificate in order to be young enough to come to Northern France and be an ambulance driver during the war — to me, that such an act of freedom, in a way. Or is it malpractice? I don't know. He was just adventurous and trying to make things happen.

KOOZ Quite literally, he wrote and created his own story to emancipate himself from his reality.

SVS Exactly. That's what really draws me to the original character, a bit like Hugh Hefner: he became the man that he was portraying in the magazines. To me, Walt became a caricature of Walt. Particularly in the younger years, there was this sense of wonder, of excess, maybe even escapism in these mental spaces. I'm just extremely intrigued by all of these synchronicities and reciprocal exchanges, from two dimensional drawing to the cinema and from the cinema to the city. Right? There's so much going on.

KOOZ As we are talking about biography, how did you get into this? Were you studying other utopias, or built versions of imagination before you stumbled across the Disney narrative?

SVS Well, I had been part of the building team for Beatriz Colomina’s Playboy Architecture exhibition. I remember having a conversation with her and thinking, what might be a counter model? Or maybe it was more like this: if Playboy’s Hugh Hefner is the one who constructs the cosmopolitan man, in an inner city context — mind you, a crime-ridden and sordid context, after the Second World War — then who is the father of suburbia? That was it: who is the Jekyll and who is the Hyde.

Without giving it much thought, but in a step that became truly important to me, I stumbled across an article where I read precisely about Walt Disney cruising through Europe in his youth. I'd always been intrigued by the ‘origin story’. Or is there such a thing as the original story? I'm enough of a postmodernist to really have a fetish for things like material skewing or storytelling through colour. The moment that I was hooked was when I started to understand this sort of incessant and idealised production of a flow of narratives, and the symbolic gesture of doing that.

I believe we truly are searching for new narratives, in a period where we are only confronted with fear-mongering politics — either through dehumanising the ‘other’ on ethnic, racial grounds or due to sexual orientation, what have you. The vast planetary consequences that we are facing as modern humans, they all have spatial repercussions, but nobody's picking up on a larger narrative. How could we again locate ourselves in a particular culture, with open heads and open hearts. No; what is manifested instead is the production of fear. So in a more political sense, I was really interested in which kind of narratives and narrative structures I could understand in Disney, with his insatiable curiosity for technology, for storytelling and for communities.

Combined with this is the production of the stories, with all of their technological and graphic innovation, but also in the mediation of those innovations. From the shaping and creation of these stories, through broadcasting, the making of them in ‘reality’, let’s say — I thought it was just incredibly smart: constructing a sense of shelter and goodness, while actually innovating through technology. There was something extremely provocative in that, for me. It was a combination of the way he was inspired by his trip to Europe and Bavaria — he brought all of that, in terms of folk stories and the iconic architecture back to America; indeed, he came multiple times to build on his library — and then also the structure of his ambition itself.

Naturally, his ambition was etched within a very 20th century perception of the world as malleable, where man can control everything. Let's not forget, it's not only the Disney cartoons they produced; it's also the documentaries. Walt was a sort of David Attenborough avant la lettre and Disney made so many beautiful educational materials. Cameras would be trained on the landscape, with only a voiceover — the central, God-like male voice, of course — explaining what was on view. For a lot of people, this was the first moment that they might encounter the exteriority of these landscapes, places they had not encountered before. Nowadays, Disney+ owns National Geographic, but this was before all of that.

KOOZ One thing that recurs is this overwhelming ambition: not content to project a particular image or mode of being in the world, but also to decide how that world is produced. The design and creation of Disney’s resorts — Disneyland in California, Disney World Resort in Orlando, later EuroDisney in Paris and beyond — was so holistic. It included the design of where people work, how they work, what they wear, their hair. It's beyond world-building in a sense, it’s the substrata and architecture behind that world too, right? The architecture of behaviour, if you like.

SVS Exactly. In the exhibition, there's a section on exactly this notion of the labouring body within the world of Disney, so to speak. You're also touching upon why I called it The Architecture of Staged Realities, in plural — because it is about this staging of multiple facets of our being. Both materially and immaterially, people are being nudged into a particular kind of behaviour.

What I find very interesting is that ‘front of house’, what we see in the attractions and the cartoons themselves, is a sort of vernacular, folkloric appropriation of different styles. Meanwhile, everything in the back office is highly rationalised, highly modern; the Burbank studio is simply a machine dropped into the landscape. So there's all these contradictions and ambiguities, right from the get-go. As you can see in the exhibition, there are lots of these ‘organograms’, connected to behavioural pamphlets — literally proscribing things like ‘thou shalt not wear a beard’. To our contemporary eyes, it seems extremely sexist, confirming normative or idealised gender-roles.

KOOZ There’s a huge imposition in terms of personal freedoms, yet the projected image is that the whole world — anything you can imagine — is yours. Then too, you’re set up with this belief that whether you're a human being or another species, or even an inanimate object: you have agency. On the other hand, if you look at Disney’s many organisational charts, there's that contradiction in terms of liberty. There are many clear parallels in today’s neoliberal agenda that demonstrate why this conversation is necessary today.

SVS But maybe we're jumping past Disney’s achievements a bit too quickly. It seems such a pertinent thing, to find an example of a very particular worldview that was consumed on such a massive scale and which had this level of orchestration to it. Whereas today, if we're talking about behavioural nudges — and not just towards consumption, but how we should behave — it's not so centralised.

KOOZ You touched on it earlier, when you said that we're searching for new narratives. Maybe I could ask you to comment on how you feel about how spatial narratives are being nudged today.

SVS I'll start with Disney and move to the contemporary. This more phenomenological connection, between the head and the body — connecting not only to the gaze, but also to the other senses — is extremely powerful and well done in the Disney parks. You can be opposed to it, but it is done through touch and sound; for instance, the body starts to resonate and is affected by deep sounds from afar. We physiologically pick up on things like smell or even songs — like the ear-worm, “it's a small world after all…”. You hear them and you’re sent into a feedback loop through this reconnection of the body with its environment. That engineered environment is also providing a certain reassurance, through light, scale, materiality, tactility and through clear vistas. I'm really intrigued by this notion that all your senses are being manipulated and at the same time you feel reassured or sheltered.

Jumping to the contemporary city: let's not forget that the origins of Disney Corp arise from the middle of the Great Depression. It was about trying to make new dreams. We need dreams at such times. So now we're in that state again. Back then we had the New Deal; now we are looking towards the ‘Green New Deal’. I am making an analogy here: I'm trying to see if I should answer through the physical city or the mental one. If anything, the idea of a park or resort was at least a space that you would move towards, right? It's still an active gesture, even mentally, from the perspective of our inner cities. But this entrapment in consumerism? It was Thatcher who said ‘there is no alternative’ except this entrapment in a metaphorical city, where consumerism reigns and the storytelling aspect of space is nearly gone.

KOOZ Or compressed within the twenty-second space of a TikTok story. What’s strange about the Disney ‘worlds’ is the fact that one has been trained for those very environments since childhood.I think Disney was not necessarily aimed at children, rather at adults who also needed to escape. But while Disney built out its various visions — including some experimental and futuristic spaces, today's nudges largely happen on a touchscreen.

SVS Yes, exactly right. But this is another reason why, in the French context, I found it also very interesting that the creation of EuroDisney involved this combination of the state, which is really backing the corporatisation of both urban and rural space. It's very telling that President Jacques Chirac is gifted, by the Disney corporation, the cell animation of Snow White receiving the poisoned apple when he agrees to the construction of EuroDisney. I mean, it is such a delicious, tongue-in-cheek moment.

KOOZ Somebody had to have planned that, right? It's not an accident.

SVS Exactly. But then using that frame as an entry point to ourselves as emotional beings and how we are nudged through desire, Walt’s whole ambition was to make an animated feature movie and make it in a way that people would cry in the end. He wanted not only the laugh — of course, a laugh is good too — but the main goal was to discover if he could make a full-length cartoon that would actually make people cry. To see if they would identify in a way you normally only identify with other humans. This was a real, clear goal — and it was successful because they did. In Snow White, there is the laugh with the dwarves, but definitely also the cry when she ‘passes’, or sleeps. So he truly understood maybe how to manipulate the emotional register, to identify the need to cry, the whole experience.

It started to dawn on me that these characters eventually started to jump outside of and operate beyond the frame. That was also quite an important insight: Disney started to use them in merchandise from very early on and we see them everywhere. They become like our imaginary friends, we recognise ourselves outside the frame, and that starts to create all these new feedback loops. I am very curious to see where they will go next. Just maybe, Disney is in search of new narratives too.

KOOZ I’ve been thinking about shared spectatorship as opposed to individual consumption. Something has changed in terms of how and where the objects of our desires are offered to us, where and how we consume them — and therefore, where the manipulation takes place.

As you said, with Disney there is a translation of an idealised image into space, into urbanism and even rural development. Some photos in the exhibition — portraits of developments on the fringes of Disney resorts — are incredible, but also kind of sad. They still carry an idea of fantasy but it is often hard to distinguish it from folly. How do you feel about those expansions, the continued attempts to propagate the Disney image and ideals beyond the staged resorts?

SVS You just reminded me of another development. Very recently, I read new details about the EuroDisney resort expansion, which will add 36 hectares, almost doubling its original footprint. This will facilitate the construction of visitor attractions for Frozen, the Star Wars franchise and another Marvel Universe area. I did some research and learned that it was planned to be built over agricultural — and still very productive — land. As a Dutch person, I’m aware of the Dutch farming history; our whole countryside has become rationalised into one big machine of production. It dawned on me again, this question of what forces create things and who has a say, who decides what kind of value is produced. I was just thinking, what legitimises the shift away from agricultural value — that is, from food production? Everyone knows and statistics show we will not have enough food for the planet. Now, that's probably a distribution question but still: what legitimises the shift from agricultural land to use as shared spectatorship — which you mentioned beautifully, but which still feels very individual in a sense. I thought, this is really a good story because you have the ‘worlding’ of Disney against localised questions about choices, values, soil, agriculture; food for the body or food for the mind.

I also read that Disney is investing in startups related to VR, artificial intelligence and robotics. Robotics has a very long history in the Disney universe and for the Imagineers. But it dawned on me again, this sort of worlding of a narrative — a very particular kind of worlding that became extremely dominant, with shared spectatorship and the technology as a sort of exhilarating promise, might be leading to all sorts of… Well, I don't want to call it tribalism. There’s a lot of theory around fandom and Disney; I find it very interesting that even if you are not represented in the Disneyverse, it still has a sort of draw. For instance, there are no gay female protagonists yet; we could talk about the female protagonists too…

KOOZ We could just write books on just that. Going back to the idea of land and its value, I notice how relatively underutilised our countryside is in the UK. Yet we have a housing crisis. In England, we don't grow much and we don't have much industry either: the countryside is an image and that is its value.

As in the Disneyverse, UK housebuilding often features mock tudor or plastic neoclassical styling; the value of a house rises with these pseudo-historic traces of aspiration. In the Disney residential extensions — like Celebration, but also the new ones under construction now — this fantasy still has an appeal, perhaps even a tribal appeal. Certainly operating in a transmedial or virtual capacity could proliferate more of that tribalism, as well as more opportunities for consumption.

SVS Exactly. Earlier, we were talking about things being frozen in time; there is an active production of nostalgia, as a way to pretend as if we can keep going with business as usual, within a Western-dominated worldview. I was thinking about the tabula rasa, while cycling in the rain, and what the appeal of the tabula rasa was (also for the Nature of Hope exhibition at IABR, which opened recently): this idea that there is no ‘before’, right? Man comes in and creates this world, freezing it in time, or in the memory of a time. And you know that the other time was better than now. Well, one could seriously question how much better that time was — which just speaks to how flawed and suggestible our memories are. I mean, in an absolute sense, the global population is in fact becoming healthier, becoming richer.

KOOZ Well, it's back to Walt again; his ‘main street’ aesthetic, which recalls his own childhood and features in each and every one of the Disney resorts, seems to project back to Depression-era America as an idealised past.

SVS There's a moving back and forth in time. I mean, he shared a passion for futuristic representations as well, and in creating a desired future. I find the production of nostalgia extremely compelling, indeed with all its material representation and semiotics — but also this idea of throwing a stone into the future, to see how he (Disney, or Man) can basically co-produce it, to a certain extent.

KOOZ Your work on Disney and its resorts has been a long journey. I could not visit its first iteration of The Architecture of Staged Realities at the Nieuwe Instituut in 2021, but did see it re-staged and expanded at Bordeaux’s arc en réve — where it remains until January 2025. What has held your attention through this research?

SVS I was writing a research proposal for a PhD when all of a sudden, due to COVID, I had a bit more time — which allowed me to really delve deeper into all of this. The then-director of the Nieuwe Instituut asked me to turn it into an exhibition. Personally, I have been very charmed or curious about why and how we force-feed a particular kind of aesthetic on people, without daring to talk about taste in terms of class and style, at least not in the Dutch context for the last 20 years. You could say that there's a relation between postmodernity and ‘super Dutch’, but for many, the postmodern conversation didn't really settle in the Dutch context. Yet there is something about this reassuring aesthetic in architecture that people like. If you ask people how they want to live, many would want what we call a boerderette, which is like an idealised farmhouse but with columns, like a neoclassical villa. There’s something curious about why people like this kind of reassurance in their built environments.

KOOZ So much social value, class struggle and aspirational lifestyle attached to these ready-made ideals: they're familiar, so it’s easy to buy into them. We could talk for longer but thank you for your time — especially on the heels of the 2024 edition of IABR, which you direct. Will you get a chance to rest?

SVS I am moderating an event called What Design Can Do in Amsterdam — but then I get a break in the mountains.

KOOZ Again, thank you so much.

SVS The pleasure was mutual.

Bio

Saskia van Stein is artistic and managing director of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR). Currently, van Stein also co-leads The Critical Inquiry Lab MA programme at the Design Academy, Eindhoven. Previously, she was artistic and managing director at Bureau Europa, Maastricht, between 2013–2019. Van Stein’s curatorial practice started at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (now Nieuwe Instituut) in Rotterdam, 2002–2012, where she has programmed exhibitions on the intersection of architecture, culture, design, fine arts, political and human sciences.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.