Midcentury Modern is turning into a fairytale. Thanks to the Disney corporation, the style will be the protagonist in a magical land of sweeping roofs, floor-to-ceiling glass poised over stone bases, and sprawling masses held together by exposed wood rafters that will arise on what is now a patch of the Colorado Desert in California’s Coachella Valley. Called Cotino in a naming I assume is engineered or imagined to evoke a combination of Spanish and Native American heritage with just a hint of science fiction, the community will be the first of what the largest entertainment company in the world envisions as a series of planned residences called Storyliving by Disney.
Despite myself, I have to admit to being intrigued. Over a lifetime that started in that supposedly golden era (for white westerners) I have ridden the wave of nostalgia for the domestication of the International Style into more rustic and expressive domiciles, living in examples of such structures in Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and (though with a slightly different style), Rotterdam in the Netherlands. My husband and I have collected the furniture and tchotchkes appropriate to filling such expansive homes and live our version of the fairytale.
Looking at Cotino more closely, however, I can only groan. What I thought was my version of the future that somehow recaptured the faith in the modern, the new, and the better has now received the ultimate mainstream treatment. Currently under construction, it will become a community of tract homes—sales for which are set to begin this year—with a special focus on retirement-aged people like myself. Each building will comply with Disney’s design controls, will be constructed around an artificial lake in the middle of the desert, and will be anchored by a downtown and club meant to look straight out of The Incredibles or any number of movies that have already turned Midcentury Modern into a fairytale land (and theme park) akin to the castle at the center of all the Disneylands and Disneyworlds.
The Storyliving venture marks Disney’s first foray into real life (so to speak) since Celebration, its 1980s-era New Urbanist addition to Disneyworld in Florida. This time, the company is letting another corporation, high-end Arizona developer DMB, take the lead, and supposedly will avoid some of the heavy-handedness of restrictions on how houses could appear and streets were shaped that limited Celebration’s growth and success. DMB is a master at creating enclaves, the first and still most prestigious of which is DC Ranch in Scottsdale, Ariz. Its wealthy neighborhoods are not exactly themed, but condense the controls and regulations of gated and planned communities to create enclaves for the rich that are coherent without feeling isolated. The developers pride themselves on integrating their McMansions with each other and the land, and here they promise that the lake they will plunk down in the middle of the desert will be sustainable because of recycling technology.
The renderings the combine has released exhibit a combination of sci-fi and developer-brochure eyewash. The difference between Cotino and any other such residential proposal, in other words, is that it is not themed to be something more broadly familiar, such as Spanish Colonial or French Chateau; rather, it will be a version of much of nearby Palm Springs, which is to say a vernacular of glass, wood, brick, stone, and steel strung together into what amount to open cages air conditioned against the desert and punctuated by expressive roofs and signs. What was once new and deliberately non-referential (except to the generators of this style, in particular local hero Albert Frey) is now contextual and traditional.
Disney promises, in fact, that its other Storytelling communities will each tell the tales, according to the company, of “the richness of each local region,” translated by the imagineers, who will bring “the attention to detail, unique amenities, and special touches that are Disney’s hallmarks,” but also the “magic” of “storytelling and storyliving” to each place—although, truth be told, the renderings of the actual homes, as opposed to the downtown, tend towards the more generic.
The deeper story here is twofold. On the one hand, Modernism, which once promised the new, is now nothing but one of the many ways we have made sense of our world through architecture and design. Depending on the target audience and place, it can be used interchangeably with forms developed for Spanish missions, New England settlements, or grand chateaux to create a livable and believable environment—to storylive, in other words.
On the other hand, there’s the notion that, as we surf our social feeds and other media outlets, we assimilate layers of repeating imagery with enough density to create a cloud of coherence that we think of as a living environment. Disney believes that suffusion has now reached the stage where it can become a whole community. Imagineering, the mode of imaginative engineering Walt Disney developed for his theme parks in the 1950s, turns out to be a very good way to build the cloud of influencer images, Instagram and TikTok pics and videos, and signature scents you encounter in hotels and stores alike into a complete environment. It makes the cloud real.
I do think there is a relationship between imagineering and Midcentury Modern revival that makes Cotino the ideal test case: They both depend on the notion of inventing a self-consciously artificial and styled environment, rather than claiming an intrinsic connection to such details as geology, construction, or materiality.
What is disappointing in the few images Disney has released is how light the theming seems to be. You would expect a greater sense of coherence and a bit more panache from the company that can take us for a ride through everything from deep space to a fairytale castle.
If I can make one small suggestion to Cotino’s imagineers, it is that they acquire a copy of Googie Modern: Architectural Drawings of Armet Davis Newlove (Angel City Press, 2022), the book that author Michael Murphy put together to highlight the truly exciting and inventive worlds the Los Angeles–based firm put together at midcentury. As the drawings show and Alan Hess’s excellent text make clear, Armet Davis Newlove distilled the energy and explosiveness of the Atomic Age into forms that were so busy extending and gesturing that they barely seemed to touch the ground.
What’s more, quite a few of the firm’s science-fiction coffee shops, stores, and motels were actually constructed, even if few survive today. The work was so radical that it gave its name to a movement (Googie, after a coffee shop chain for which Armet Davis Newlove designed several locations) and the surviving buildings continue to show up in the movies. In this firm’s work, the glass does not extend, it dissolves; planes don’t just cantilever, they soar; and signs and buildings become one in a way that belies Venturi’s and Scott Brown’s dictum that the duck cannot be a decorated shed and vice versa. Googie Modernism also installed itself in the middle of what was then the red-hot center of a new kind of America reinventing itself.
What Armet Davis Newlove proposed was truly radical. What Disney and DMB are building in the Coachella Valley is reactionary in the most profound sense of that word: Reacting against everything that is now new, contradictory, and troubling, it proposes a misty and vague escape into a version of the good life we once thought we would have as an enclave for the privileged in the middle of nowhere.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
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