Subject: Rat Art 1 
Sender: jya@pipeline.com (John Young)




   Financial Times, September 7, 1996, p. XIV.
 
 
   Mousehouse on show. Disney designs are to star in Venice,
   says Christopher Parkes
 
 
   Architecture from the Walt Disney Company, a pixilated
   design form which has sprung from the cartoon storyboard
   into "real life" service in office buildings and houses,
   has been selected to represent US artistic endeavour at one
   of the world's leading art showcases.
 
   Works disparaged as 'architorture" in some critical
   circles, and representing the efforts of three dozen
   top-rank architects and untold hundreds from Disney's
   "Imagineering" division, will fill the entire US pavilion
   at the Venice Biennale.
 
   The exhibition. which opens on September 15. is likely to
   prove a rigorous test for entertainment architecture which
   has gained some status and recognition in the US.
 
   The 150 exhibits will span the 40-plus years between the
   opening of Disneyland in Anaheim and the recent arrival of
   the first residents in Celebration. This idealised new town
   community in Florida planned to foster lost "traditional"
   social attributes such as walking to the shops and talking
   to the neighbours.
 
   The coup for Disney marks an ingenious response from the
   Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, a major arts patron which
   owns the US pavilion in Venice site, to the withdrawal of
   US government funding for the biennial event. Short of
   cash, the US Information Agency, which in past years
   underwrote displays of works by leading artists and
   architects, has now left the foundation to its own devices.
 
   Accordingly, the pavilion which introduced Warhol soup cans
   to the world's gaze, will this year display a model of
   Disney's animation studios in Burbank.
 
   This building, seen daily by thousands of commuters on the
   Ventura Freeway, boasts a conical centrepiece decked out as
   the apprentice sorcerer's hat worn by Mickey Mouse in
   Fantasia. The roof-line is adapted from the profile of the
   Mad Hatter's tea-party topper.
 
   The structure, which houses offices in the "hats", and
   studios, and frisbee areas inside its main body where the
   creative types work, was designed by Robert A.M. Stern, and
   completed last y ear. Corporate headquarters, home to Mr
   Michael Eisner, the Disney chairman who 10 years ago was
   persuaded to scrap his notion for a Mickey Mouse-shaped
   hotel, will also feature. This jolly item, notable for a
   roof held up by giant sandstone caryatids modelled on Snow
   White's seven dwarf co-stars is the work of Mr Michael
   Graves.
 
   Despite the designer's reputation for controversial
   designs, his original drawings were deemed too dull by Mr
   Eisner, who said the facade looked like a bank.
 
   Although the origins of Mousehouse architecture lie, as
   with most Disney manifestations, with the company's fabled
   founder, Mr Eisner has been the main driver of its
   development since he joined the group in 1984.
 
   He appointed Mr Stern to the group board as a token of his
   commitment to the notion that art and popular entertainment
   can intermingle happily and profitably and his professed
   desire to do something bolder and "more fun" than making
   "transitory" films.
 
   According to the book *Building a Dream*, to be published
   to coincide with the biennial opening, there is no shortage
   of architects willing to take the Disney challenge.
   "Architecture should not be esoteric," Mr Robert Venturi,
   one of the fast-growing Mousehouse school said. It should
   be open to interpretations by many people, he added. "And
   besides, we like to do architecture that children like."
 
   [Photo omitted] The Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland:
   architectural inspiration
 
   [End]