The company's commitment to big-time architecture is puzzling, given its expertise in environmental design.
"We allow no geniuses around our studio," Walt Disney once said, so why has his company, which has had such phenomenal success at creating physical environments without the help of big-name outsiders, turned to people like Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern, Antoine Predock, and Frank Gehry for hotels, office buildings, and other commissions? Disney chairman Michael Eisner calls it a search for "excellence" and maintains that "we do it because we have to" to stay ahead financially. He also concedes, however, that "the hotel we get the best response on is the Grand Floridian," a straightforward Disneyesque interpretation of a turn-of-the-century resort hotel executed by architects Wimberly, Alison, Tong & Goo but conceived by the Imagineers (the prodigious designers of Disney"s theme attractions). The Disney reputation for superior planning is so strong that the only things a "genius" architect could contribute are things Disney seems to have proven unnecessary to commercial success, things valued in the world of High Architecture: intellectual content, academic allusion, irony, ambiguity. Disney doesn"t "have to" employ high-design architects; the simple explanation is that they want these things because Michael Eisner wants t '
"When I was growing up, I always wantdlll to work at CBS, not because of their programfibut because of their Saarinen building," says Eifher, who ended up across the street at ABC, tauntdfl by his view of the more exalted CBS buildingl§ He remembered the lesson that "architecture fis a magnet; if it"s good it draws you in."
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