narraTIVe enVIronmenTS from disneyland to World of Warcraft
In 1955, Walt Disney opened what many regard as the first ever theme park in Anaheim, California, 28 miles southeast of Los Angeles. In the United States, various types of attractions had enjoyed varying degrees of success over the preceding 100 years. From the edgy and sometimes scary fun of the seedy seaside boardwalk to the exuberant industrial futurism of the World's Fair to the " high " culture of the museum, middle class Americans had plenty of amusements. More than the mere celebrations of novelty, technology, entertainment and culture that preceded it, Disneyland was a synthesis of architecture and story (Marling 1997) It was a revival of narrative architecture, which had previously been reserved for secular functions, from the royal tombs of Mesopotamia and Egypt to the temples of the Aztecs to the great cathedrals of Europe. Over the centuries, the creation of narrative space has primarily been the purview of those in power; buildings whose purpose is to convey a story are expensive to build and require a high degree of skill and artistry. Ancient " imagineers " shared some of the same skills as Disney's army of creative technologists: they understood light, space flow, materials and the techniques of illusion; they could make two dimensions appear as three and three dimensions appear as two; they understood the power of scale, and they developed a highly refined vocabulary of expressive techniques in the service of awe and illusion (Klein 2004) Like the creators of Disney land, they built synthetic worlds, intricately planned citadels often set aside from the day today bustle of emergent, chaotic cities or serving as a centerpiece of escape within them. Narrative space is not new, nor is it an aberration of 20 th century capitalism and commercialism. In fact, architecture has functioned as a narrative medium for millennia. Cities themselves also have a rich, emergent folk narrative of their own a messy, unplanned story of ad hoc expansion, a stark contrast to the highly controlled schema of narrative spaces (Mumford 1961, Brand 1994) Different stylistic motifs were layered upon each other. Against a scenography of a rich historical cityscape and a lineage of narrative spaces, European modernism must have seemed refreshing in its vision to shed the shackles of hegemonic ideologies and aesthetic eclecticism to create a new, purer form of space. Yet for places with little of their own historical backdrop, such as the newer, postautomotive settlements