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After Happily Ever After: An architectural fairy tale of Walt Disney

Part 2 Project 2016
Greg Walton
 Newcastle University | UK
Just as Walt Disney rewrote traditional fairytales, this project writes the last moments of Disney’s life as an architectural fairytale, beginning with Disney in his hospital bed fantasizing about his ambitious (and ultimately abandoned) EPCOT project on the ceiling tiles above him. The fairytale catalogues moments from his life into symbolic architectural gestures; allowing for a delirious landscape and performance of psyche to develop through narrative, illustration and performative installation.
Greg Walton
Tutor(s)
2016
When Walt Disney was in his hospital bed, dying of lung cancer, nurses reported that he used the 600mm square ceiling tiles above him as a device to plan and visualise his EP-COT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) project. A proposal that died
The proposal becomes the third iteration of EPCOT, the first hand sketched by Walt, the second by his team of Imagineers, the third constructed from a reading of his psyche.
High on morphine; Walt’s fantastical EPCOT overtakes the ceiling, making tangible what is intangible in his mind. His obsessions take symbolic form from his creations informing the third design for EPCOT. Themes of self-preservation and legacy become the
As Disney drifts in and out of consciousness his fairytales (that he manipulated once for his films) are re-manipulated; taking Disney themes perversely out of context to create a new narrative.
The step-sisters in Cinderella become the new protagonists in the retold fairy tale. Ob-sessed with cosmetic surgery, modern themes of self-preservation are common in Disney, his own life, and in modern Florida, where EPCOT is based.
Snow White. The third of Walt’s kingdom’s sees a woman obsessed with youth and ideal-ising the past. Just as Walt did with his hometown of Marceline, Missouri.
Walt’s addiction to perfection and control was likened to Gepetto in the Pinocchio tales. A Pygmalion Complex of needing to create and mould perfection. The architectural form become hanging pavilions, based on Pinocchio.
The fairytale narrative follows a protagonist through the building
The architectural manifestation of creating a structure informed by the workings of a mar-ionette. Like Pinocchio, the building begins as a static, inert object to something that is movable, real and alive.
Cryogenics - the ultimate expression of self-preservation. Sleeping Beauty who sleeps for 100 years only to be reawakened is retold as she searches for a new resting place to be reawakened in the future. Not by the kiss of a prince, but by the science of
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