Celebration, Florida

May 4, 2005

Celebration, FLIn 1994, the Walt Dis­ney Com­pany fig­ured out what they could do with a sliver of unde­vel­oped land near Dis­ney World. Exec­u­tives decided to trans­form the swamp land (pre­vi­ously used as a hold­ing tank of sorts for cap­tured alli­ga­tors) into a master-planned liv­ing com­mu­nity, deem­ing it Cel­e­bra­tion, Florida.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, there are two ver­sions as to the rea­son­ing behind this decision:

One story for the rea­son behind Disney’s idea to build a com­mu­nity there was that Osce­ola County was con­sid­er­ing tax­ing the land at a higher rate to rec­og­nize its poten­tial, and so Dis­ney chose to make money off it.

Another ver­sion, which seems to be more per­sonal and friendly is that the Walt Dis­ney Com­pany was ful­fill­ing Walt Disney’s orig­i­nal vision of EPCOT as an “exper­i­men­tal pro­to­type com­mu­nity of tomor­row”. Instead of becom­ing a test­bed for com­mu­nity liv­ing and city plan­ning, his orig­i­nal vision turned into more of a show­case for cur­rent and future tech­nolo­gies; a hands-on learn­ing center.

In Walt’s words:

EPCOT … will take its cue from the new ideas and new tech­nolo­gies that are now emerg­ing from the cre­ative cen­ters of Amer­i­can indus­try. It will be a com­mu­nity of tomor­row that will never be com­pleted, but will always be intro­duc­ing and test­ing and demon­strat­ing new mate­ri­als and sys­tems. And EPCOT will always be a show­case to the world for the inge­nu­ity and imag­i­na­tion of Amer­i­can free enterprise.

Dur­ing the con­struc­tion phase, the Walt Dis­ney Com­pany sought the help of world-renowned Robert A.M. Stern archi­tects, Cooper Robert­son & Part­ners and Michael Bierut and part­ners from Pen­ta­gram who worked together in cre­at­ing a har­mo­nious con­cept of “New Urban­ism”. A rel­a­tively new ideal, New Urban­ism is the syn­ergy of mod­ernism and futur­ism where res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial zones would be meshed together.

Archi­tects and graphic design­ers worked together in cre­at­ing every minute detail in the town, from the homes to the movie the­atres includ­ing cus­tom designed man­hole cov­ers and street signs. Accord­ing to one of the lead graphic design­ers on the project it wasn’t always a pleas­ant col­lab­o­ra­tion as design­ers and archi­tects would on more than one occas­sion clash horns. In the end, the result was noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar; a neigh­borly com­mu­nity wrapped in archi­tec­tural per­fec­tion, even if that sense of per­fec­tion has attracted crit­ics who see Cel­e­bra­tion as noth­ing more than a “cel­e­brated” movie set. 

10 comments

We talked about Cel­e­bra­tion, FL in an urban plan­ning class I took last year. Very fascinating.

It’s inter­est­ing to see exam­ples along the plan­ning spec­trum — from unplanned cities like Old Boston to over­planned cities like Cel­e­bra­tion. The right way, as always, is some­where in between.

The trick is to pro­vide enough struc­ture and guid­ance that it’s easy for peo­ple to build smart. With no plan­ning or guid­ance what­so­ever, you get chaos. At best, when there are geo­graph­i­cal con­straints (like in Boston), this turns out to be lively and inter­est­ing. At worst, with no con­straints, you get big box retail.

A great exam­ple of doing it the “right way” is Chicago. After the Great Fire in 1871, the city was rebuilt with a new oppor­tu­nity for good plan­ning. Appar­ently, the pre-fire Chicago was chaotic and dis­or­derly, only min­i­mally con­strained by the loca­tion of the lake. After the fire, a new set of guide­lines helped direct future devel­op­ment and as a result Chicago is one of the best-planned cities on a fun­da­men­tal level. (More recent plan­ning, includ­ing pub­lic trans­porta­tion, is another story…)

by John Zeratsky on May 4, 2005 at 1:14 pm. Reply #

Hey Erik, on a totally unre­lated sub­ject, WB is plan­ning on remak­ing the Looney Toons.. You can find a pre­view of the upcom­ing car­toon here:

here.

by Matt (brother) on May 4, 2005 at 2:21 pm. Reply #

John: Thanks for the added insight. I’m always inter­ested in the dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies of design and archi­tec­ture in par­tic­u­lar, an aspect of design that is some­times overlooked.

On that note, it’s a good thing the Great Fire of 1871 occured, oth­er­wise Chicago wouldn’t have been restruc­tured the way it is today.

by kartooner on May 4, 2005 at 4:33 pm. Reply #

I read a long arti­cle on Cel­e­bra­tion some years ago in NYT mag­a­zine. Walt Dis­ney indeed thought of EPCOT as a full-fledged urban project, com­plete with res­i­dences and all (though in a some­what more futur­is­tic fash­ion than the actual quaint home designs over there).

From what I remem­ber of such arti­cle, it talked a lot of how the devel­op­ment process went, and how Disney’s ide­al­is­tic vision of a per­fect com­mu­nity “done right in all counts” clashed with the real­i­ties of an imper­fect world.

Com­ing to think of it, our capi­tol city would make good use of a great fire like Chicago’s — it is such an unsolv­able urban mess that best bet should be being able to start from scratch. Honestly.

by beto on May 4, 2005 at 4:42 pm. Reply #

By capi­tol city, I assume you mean Wash­ing­ton, D.C. Right?

Funny thing about that… Wash­ing­ton is one of the few master-planned cities in Amer­ica. Pierre L’Enfant was recruited by George Wash­ing­ton him­self to design the city, but then “fired” before he could fin­ish. Later, his plan was re-adopted and con­tin­ues to be used today in plan­ning devel­op­ment in the city.

by John Zeratsky on May 4, 2005 at 4:50 pm. Reply #

Capi­tol city = San Jose, Costa Rica. I was lack­ing bet­ter terms to say “main city of third world coun­try” or some­thing like that.

Assump­tions are funny, huh? :D

BTW, I was on DC last August. I’d be more than happy if our cities were a tenth as orga­nized as Wash­ing­ton, though I like San Fran­cisco best.

by beto on May 4, 2005 at 6:20 pm. Reply #

Yeah, I totally assumed you were in the U.S. Silly me. Guess I will be more care­ful from now on…

by John Zeratsky on May 4, 2005 at 9:05 pm. Reply #

If mem­ory serves me (which it doesn’t always), Michael Bierut helped design quite a bit of Cel­e­bra­tion — I believe he men­tioned it at a local AIGA pre­sen­ta­tion I attended. I think he talked about how every­thing from the man­holes to the street signs were touched by his team at Pentagram.

by Max on May 6, 2005 at 12:01 pm. Reply #

Hi recently found your site, enjoy­ing your blogs and have added them to Sage (fire­fox plu­gin). I vis­ited cel­e­bra­tions while I was over in the states last Christmas.

To be hon­est I actu­ally found the place a lit­tle spooky. The whole place is so reg­i­mented, there is no oppor­tu­nity for self expres­sion or artis­tic licence, in some cases I can see how this would be a good idea i.e. no cars parked on the lawns being worked on and no ghastly neon pink or elec­tric blue houses.

How­ever one thing I found espe­cially odd was the fact that every house has had sudo win­dows placed into the roof to make it look like the per­fect Amer­i­can house. Yet there are no rooms behind the win­dows in fact appar­ently the win­dows are just stuck onto the out­side of the houses to make it more aes­thet­i­cally pleasing.

Is this not just the fur­ther­ing the image con­scious­ness of soci­ety? Here in the UK young chil­dren are obsessed with look­ing older and like pop stars before they are grown. Yet another step in the wrong direc­tion its like send­ing a mes­sage to all the Amer­i­cans who live below the poverty line “look another piece of the Amer­i­can dream you can’t hope to attain”. Also I won­der if you live in a utopian town which has a utopian com­mu­nity if you think much about what is going on out­side your town, state dare I say it Country?

Just my two peneth worth

Nice Blog
Jx

by ylawayjdp on May 10, 2005 at 4:19 pm. Reply #

If you didn’t see oddly-colored houses in Cel­e­bra­tion (not to men­tion junky cars), you didn’t come very far into town. We’re got elec­tric blue and mus­tard yel­low houses, as well as a large, pur­ple Vic­to­rian that is cur­rently under con­struc­tion. A few of the homes have the fake win­dows, but most of the upstairs win­dows are gen­uine. It amazes me at how many of the old rumors refuse to die and how many peo­ple still believe them, even when they have sup­pos­edly been here to visit.

We’ve owned our home in Cel­e­bra­tion for two years now, and I snicker over sup­posed “facts” about our com­mu­nity. We’re not even close to Walt’s vision of Epcot, although I guess it makes a quaint story. I have a blog at http://celebrationfl.blogspot.com that gives my take on life in the “Dis­ney Town.” It’s prob­a­bly as skewed as any­thing else, but I like to think it gives a more gen­uine por­trait of our community.

by Barb on August 14, 2005 at 9:31 pm. Reply #

Leave your comment

Required.

Required. Not published.

If you have one.