The Fabrication of Fantastical Landscapes

The Fabrication of Fantastical Landscapes

An Investigation of Escapist Design at Le Hameau de la Reine and Disneyland Paris

Cyrus Dahmubed Constructs and Contexts - GSAPP - NY/P Prof. Lara Belkind April 15, 2013

At the end of a long-weekend spent at Disneyland Paris, the average 8-year old princess-in-training is likely to tell you that all of her dreams really have come true. Somewhere amidst the caverns beneath Sleeping Beauty’s towering palace, a flight over London in a personal version of Captain Hook’s Jolly Roger, meeting the most famous filmic characters – both the original Disney creations and those stolen from medieval folk tales – fantasies were realized. The 1-kilometer radius that contains Europe’s most visited themed attraction can, for adults and children alike, seem to lose its mooring to the realm of reality despite professing to be “the Happiest Place on Earth”.

When fantasy comes to life, to physical fruition, it can be hard to distinguish it as truly fantasy, its tangibility asserting it more as escapist reality than somnolent impossibility, and when access to this reality becomes easy and frequent enough it’s unsurprising that a desire for it to transform from escapist to standard can arise. Leaving behind the princess-in-training for a true princess, Marie Antoinette’s youngest daughter Marie-Thérèse Charlotte had access to a Disneyland Paris of her own. Le Hameau de la Reine, or the Queen’s Hamlet in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles offered to France’s most talked-about queen a personalized variety of fantastical escapism not too unlike that found at Disneyland Paris today. Though quite a bit larger than Le Hameau de la Reine, the expansive region Disney has bought, controlled, and created in the town of Marne-laVallée, shares striking conceptual and physical similarities to the realm of Marie Antoinette’s most freeing fantasies. These concepts and their built manifestations are the groundwork for an analysis of the progressively present domain of fantasy in the built environment from 18th-century bucolicism to 21st-century hyper-urbanism. As the wildest fantasies of sheikh’s and princes take hold at the urban level just as those of princesses and princesses-in-training have before we must ask, is it really a good thing to have all one’s dreams come true?

Scenes from Disneyland Paris and Le Hameau de La Reine at Versialles.

The two primary case studies explored herein may at first appear rather irreconcilable. Certainly a village built for the exclusive use and follies of the Queen of France on the grounds of one of the world’s most impressive palace estates must bear insurmountable differences to a massive complex of amusement park rides with childish facades that has been criticized as an attempt to “export the worst of American capitalism to the European countryside” (Lainsbury xxi). A concise history of each project will suffice to explore the differences in circumstance that oversaw their creation, before a consideration of their similar roles in understanding the infiltration of fantasy into the built habitat.

Mique’s Temple de l’Amour on an island in the creek with the east facade of

Approaching the projects chronologi- the Petit Trianon in the background. cally, Le Hameau de la Reine was built in 1783 by Marie Antoinette near the Petit Trianon, which was her private residence at Versailles. Le Hameau occupies the northeastern corner of Versailles’ gardens and along with the Petit Trianon and surrounding gardens comprises an area marked today as The Queen’s Estate, though there is little evidence to suggest that this demarcation existed in the 18th-century. As Antonia Fraser notes in her much-discussed, 2001 biography “Marie Antoinette: The Journey”, the Petit Trianon and Le Hameau were intended to function as a space for Marie Antoinette to host her closest friends and intimate relations, as well as a retreat from the affairs of court.

The Petit Trianon was designed by an architect hired by Louis XV and originally served as a residence for his famed mistress Madame du Barry before Louis XVI granted it to Marie Antoinette. Thereupon Richard Mique, who was a favorite of the Queen’s, designed Le Hameau, its structures, and the landscape and follies of the rest of the Petit Trianon’s gardens. Le Hameau originally featured ten buildings, two of which are no longer extant. It is designed around a central lake, and is connected to the Petit Trianon via a garden that features a meandering creek and complementary paths, Mique’s Pavillion du Rocher at the head of a small pond that feeds the creek, and his Temple de l’Amour on its own island in the middle of the creek. Significantly - for reasons forthcoming - all of this extends from the north and east facades of the Petit Trianon, while the gardens of the south and west facades are in traditionally axial French style of landscape design.

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The briefest of histories of Le Hameau and the Petit Trianon traversed, a glance at Disneyland Paris’s development may surprisingly reveal a history as sordid and scandalous as Versailles’ infamous past. Planning for what came to be Disneyland Paris was first considered in 1972, but failed to take hold until the mid 1980’s. After an exhaustive and very competitive search to determine the most appropriate location for Disney’s European presence, a 20-km2 area was selected 32 km to the west of Paris, in the region of Chessy. Sparing the gritty details of the business deals that are usually involved with such a project, construction began at what was then called EuroDisney in 1988 and the Disneyland Park officially opened 12 April 1992. Since opening, Disneyland Paris has added the Walt Disney Studios Park, which adjoins the Disneyland Park and the Disney Village. Even at the largest scale, the design of the complex is significant. It is inscribed quite prominently on the landscape by a ring-road with a diameter of 3 km, and inside this road are the three parks, the transit hub that anchors them, parking lots, farmland, and part of the Disney-built town of Val d’Europe. The main Disneyland Park houses the traditional fair. The five realms of the park, Main Street, U.S.A., Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Discoveryland, are centered on a glorified traffic circle in front of the characteristically prominent castle; in this case it is that of Sleeping Beauty. The Disneyland Park being more-or-less a circle itself, its entrance is onto a plaza which houses the terminus of an RER line that provides rapid access to Paris and the region between as well as high-speed TGV trains to Brussels, Lille, and Aéroport Charles de Gaulle. Also facing this train station is Disney Village, which opened contemporaneously with the Park. Intended to provide evening entertainment, shopping, and dining options for the Park and hotel guests, the area’s main promenade and surrounding buildings were designed by Frank Gehry, and feature many of his characteristic design elements. At the end of the central promenade is a large lake from which flow three streams and around which are rather picturesquely situated the seven Disney hotels. Finally, the Walt Disney Studio Park, which was opened in 2002 and hosts many famous rides such as the Tower of Terror along with behindthe-scenes tours of Disney studios is the most recent and, so far, least successful element.

Sleeping Beauty’s Palace at the head of Main Street, U.S.A. (left), and Frank Gehry’s Disney Village (right).

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One of Disneyland Paris’s most important design features is its circular nature. Walt Disney’s original intention for the land he had purchased in Orlando, Florida had been to develop it into the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. Though abandoned after his death, the original designs for EPCOT were not unlike many of the radial and garden city designs of the late 19th- and early 20thcentury that were proposed largely as new and superior forms of urbanism in Britain as living conditions in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham worsened. Indeed, EPCOT was intended to serve as an experimental city with which to stimulate the American economy and bore many similarities to its British predecessors, such as a futuristic transit system (Disney’s famous monorail is a remnant of this), a hyper-built core that would allow for an immediate transition to farms, and a clear hub-and-spoke grand scheme (Beard 118). Of all the Disney parks Disneyland Paris, arguably, comes closest to realizing this intention. In addition to its system of circles within circles as a design logic, the transit that serves Disneyland Paris is evocative of Mr. Disney’s early intentions. In addition to the monorail, the Disneyland Park features a circumferential Industrial Era inspired railroad that stops at each of the Park’s themed areas. Additionally, the RER/TGV train station functions as a main core while each of the three main parks have their own sense of centralization.

Though the technicalities of Le Hameau de la Reine and Disneyland Paris are not intrinsically fantastical, it is in the designed and built form of the two places that the physicalization of the otherwise intangible fantastical 4

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takes place. Furthermore, there are specific design elements that contribute to creating different facets of the sense of fantasy such as romanticization, escapism, the picaresque (not to be confused with the picturesque), and bucolicism. It is important to recognize a difference between Le Hameau and Disneyland Paris: frequently at Disneyland the attempt is not to create a sense of fantasy at the micro level, but rather to fabricate the overall feeling of it. Resultantly, the basest elements of kitsch, pastiche, and falsehood are routinely employed throughout Disneyland. Conversely, Le Hameau maintains a similar though less frenetic sense of fantasy by ensuring that each element imparts such a sense independently of the grander scale.

The first element that Disneyland and Le Hameau share is a network of meandering paths. At Le Hameau the presence of these paths is a reflection of the shift in landscape design fashion from the French style to the English style, which is preoccupied with the qualities of naturalism and picturesqueness.

As previously mentioned, Le Hameau also features a meandering stream and seemingly natural lakes. Not only beautiful, paths that wander through a landscape serve an often unspoken function as time-wasters. The English style garden was most loved and used by the English, French, and later American leisure classes who were afforded the luxury of the time to stroll. This is taken to the extreme in the case of Marie Antoinette as a result of the relationships she had with Louis XVI and his court, both of which Fraser characterizes as “tenuous” and “strained” (Fraser 264) in her biography. As she neither had nor

wanted a prominent and active governmental role, but simultaneously was not permitted to do much beyond the confines of Versailles, it is not surprising that the paths of Le Hameau are arranged in such a way so as to allow one to wander along them aimlessly for hours. Built along side rustic bridges, expansive views, and hidden garden structures that serve to distract from the amount of time spent going from point A to B, these paths allow one to reach a destination either accidentally or with purpose via a temporally consumptive route that was intended to break up the tedium of the day.

Paths such as those at Le Hameau can be found in two manifestations at Disneyland Paris.

At the large scale, the majority of Disneyland and the Walt Disney Studios Park consist of paths that meander and circumnavigate their way around the various rides and other attractions. These have a somewhat disorienting effect and add to the apparent size and transportive majesty of the complex.

Another manifestation is something that Disney is renowned for having mastered: the art of queuing.

With many rides that take 3-4 minutes to experience having queues of over an hour, it has been necessary for Disney to find some way of making the wait bearable. The result is that the queues almost always meander through the ride or attraction itself, permitting glimpses of the excitement to come, photo-taking opportunities, or even brief interactive moments and games. In this way it is possible for visitors, particularly excited children, to not notice that well over half the day has been spent queuing. In essence the paths at Le Hameau and Disneyland Paris function in exactly the same way. As time-passers, their primary purposes is to make meaningful and exciting the tediousness of slowly traversing a route, thereby preserving the sense of fantasy that the rest

The bucolic, naturalist landscape of Le Hameau: the central lake of the village (above) and the surrounding farmland (right).

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The axial French gardens that lead to the Petit Trianon from the Grand Trianon.

of the experience is intended to cultivate. A secondary purpose more evident at Le Hameau is as a form of fantasy themselves. There the paths interact with the surrounding landscape to create a sense of adventure that is not necessarily reliant on an impending outcome.

Though critical to the creation of a sense of fantasy, the meandering paths at Le Hameau and Disneyland Paris are certainly not the only ways to traverse the landscape. Versailles very famously features axial paths that all relate to the structure of the main palace and Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A. shares a similar spatial relationship with Sleeping Beauty’s Palace. The relationship between meandering and axial paths is a meaningful one that in the case of the two different sites explores a different message. At Versailles, the west and south facades of the Petit Trianon face the Grand Trianon and the main Chateau, respectively. As these were both securely the King’s domain and directly represented his property and power, the gardens that extend toward them from the Petit Trianon are in the strict traditional French style, with promenades of trees and plantings frequently so grand as to resemble the nave of a Gothic cathedral. However, the Petit Trianon functions as an interstitial structure between the domains of the King and Queen. Seen aerially the shift is most evident: on the south and west sides the grand axes of the rest of the estate are continued at ever reducing scales, while to the north and east the paths swerve toward Le Hameau and through the Queen’s Estate as though tracing the steps of a drunk party goer. Becoming more and more wild as they approach Le Hameau the paths act as a buffer of sorts between the heart of the Queen’s fantasy world and the realities of her courtly life.

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The nostalgic, Americana “Main Street, U.S>A.” at Disneyland Paris.

Just as the Petit Trianon acts as the lynchpin between the fantastical landscape of Marie Antoinette’s realm and the unavoidable realism of those of the king, Sleeping Beauty’s palace at Disneyland marks the boundary between the axial nature of the traditional American town found in Main Street, U.S.A and the realms of Fantasyland, Adventureland, Fronteirland, and Discoveryland. Though Disneyland Paris has frequently been criticized as an attempted exportation of the evils of American commercialism into the purity of the European countryside, the relationship between these two powers is perhaps best attested to by the layout of Disneyland itself. Here, America represented by Main Street, U.S.A. is reduced essentially to a sort of display case.

Main Street is little more than a stage set of an early 20th-century Midwestern American town. Though probably rather amusing to the European eye, its attempted nostalgia – an important element of fantasy itself - of a bygone era of the American Heartland is likely lost in cultural translation to its primarily European audience. Main Street, U.S.A. is more a museum gift store than it is a fantasy world.

However, the soaring towers of the palace at the end of Main Street signal the promise of the physical fruition of the greatest animated tales of princesses and witches. Thus is the line between fantasy and reality blurred.

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Perhaps the ultimate concern in any attempted fabrication of the fantastical is that of programming. Inhabiting it with the follies of the users’ imagination further mystifies a landscape, no matter how transportive a quality it inherently has. In Disneyworld, most program is of course focused primarily on rides and amusements based on various Disney films, shows, and characters. Here, fantasy is rather easily established, particularly for younger visitors who view the entirety of a visit to Disneyland as an opportunity to get lost in the surreal.

At Le Hameau, program is treated a bit more subtly, and is really only achieved as a result of this. Marie Antoinette’s village brings to fruition its escapist intentions by straddling the line between reality and fantasy. The crucial factor here is that for her, the ultimate fantasy was the simplest of lives. A country village with an idyllic farm, herb gardens, babbling brooks, and happy animals was as removed from the rigidity of corsets and courtliness as possible. Le Hameau is fabricated, for it certainly did not develop organically, but nevertheless imparts a hyper-reality rather than a falsified fantasy as at Disneyland Paris. Featuring a moulin (mill), dairy, apothecary, and a few other essentials of village life, it is only through close analysis of the materials and craftsmanship that one might manage to notice the implementation of rustication – a visual technique used to create the appearance that a building or landscape is older and more rustic that it actually is. Recognition of this leads to the idea that the place may in fact be a façade, and indeed, to a certain degree it is. Intermingled amongst the village shops were buildings for Marie Antoinette’s personal seamstresses and cobblers, a treasury, and her private mansion – not programs traditionally assumed of a quiet village or the milkmaid that Fraser notes the Dauphine liked to dress as when visiting her hamlet (Fraser 325-27). Herein lies a final and crucial similarity between Le Hameau and Disneyland Paris, indeed all of the Disney parks worldwide: achieving fantasy is dependent upon the recognition of a place’s fabrication. Fantasy means having the best of both worlds: being the princess and the milkmaid, experiencing the wilds of the frontier and then enjoying the comforts of five-star resorts.

From top: The cottage of the moulin, animals on the farm on the outskirts of Le Hameau, the ruins of the dairy, Maison de la Reine (The Queen’s House), farm buildings.

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In the modern day, the ultimate importance of understanding the integration of fantasy into the built environment is best realized when we consider the ways in which our fastest growing cities are developing. At Le Hameau de la Reine and Disneyworld Paris there is a self-consciousness to any sense of fantasy and escapism. Both were intentionally designed as places of retreat from the exhaustive reality of everyday life where their intended users could experience their fantasies, albeit with some level of cognizance that fantasy and everyday life are not one and the same. Somehow, this cognizance is being increasingly done away with. At the least extreme end of the spectrum are cities = frequently state or federal capitals - that develop some sort of themed tourist zone.

Sacramento, CA, Washington, D.C., and Berlin are all guilty of creating mono-programmatic neighborhoods for museums or other sorts of tourist fare. At the more problematic and concerning end of the spectrum are cities like Las Vegas, Dubai, Doha, and many cities in China all of which – some more successfully than others – have undertaken to inject or substitute into their urban fabric blatant fantastical constructs. Even after being setback by the global economic downturn and its own debt issues, Dubai’s desert landscape already features an indoor ski resort, a manmade archipelago in the form of the world that allows residents to own “countries”, an underwater hotel named “Atlantis”, vast canals that exist solely for aesthetic purposes, amusement and theme parks, and on the docket for the future is a sub-development whose main features are to be larger-than-life replicas of the world’s

monuments, called “Falconcity of Wonders”.

There are complex sociopolitical and economic games at foot here. Such cities are evidence that urbanism has lost sight of the importance of straddling the line between reality and the surreal when dealing with the presence of fantasy. Inserting so directly and blatantly into the urban fabric environments that resemble much more nearly Disneyland that any traditionally understood city is indicative that the people who build and inhabit such places – a rapidly growing percentage of the world’s population – are either unaware or unconcerned with maintaining a grip on reality. It is presumably rather easy to get lost in the hysteria of excitement that might surround the construction of another Taj Mahal, but only if one loses track of the fact that the original is only a marvel because of its historical, cultural, political, and even folkloric contexts and significances. Rebuilding it, or any similar monument, with modern technology and resources simply is not the spectacle it might promise in some eyes. Nevertheless, for those willing to overlook such issues, the presence of the world’s greatest monuments collected and assembled simultaneously as though on exhibit at a museum and as a civic center must be quite surreal. Many of Dubai’s sites, even the iconic towers that make up its skyline, are distinguishable because they are all perceived to be archetypal or ideal elements of a thriving city. Unfortunately, the fantasy of a city does not a city make and simply collecting elements that are perceived to give cities vitality and significance only serves to propagate the idea that fantasy and reality are interchangeable and can inhabit the same realm. The reality is Cyrus Dahmubed

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that fantasy only succeeds when it is consciously and carefully, even scientifically introduced into reality. By definition, reality is most successful when unperturbed by misplaced attempts at establishing an environment of escapism. Our most “real” environments – especially cities but any place that fully engages all of our senses – instantly have their inherent virtues negated when they attempt to become something that they simply are not.

Fantasy has been making the leap from a purely mental construct to a physical one for quite some time. From Le Hameau de la Reine to Disneyland Paris and even to Dubai and many examples in between, the construction of fantasy has always had its roots in a desire to augment reality. Ultimately, physicalized fantasy succeeds only when we recognize that a place is being made fantastical and choose to suspend our disbelief regarding it; there is a necessity in the recognition that we are choosing escapism. This is a realization that cannot happen when dealing with real cities because in order to function successfully they must retain their grounding to reality. Cities cannot be fantasylands because as Le Hameau and Disneyland Paris have shown, fantasylands are made up of meandering paths designed to waste time, amusement park rides with lying facades, entire villages focused on pleasing one person, and grand palaces that set the stage for deaths both fictional and historic.

Cities must function, and while fantastical landscapes may serve a purpose as an escape from the highly functional, it is perhaps most important that we learn to understand, harness, and implement the fantastical nature of urban reality.

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Bibliography Beard, Richard R., Walt Disney’s EPCOT: Creating the New World of Tomorrow. H.N. Abrams, New York. 1982 Duvernois, Christian, Marie Antoinette and the Last Garden at Versailles. Rizzoli Press, New York. 2008 Fraser, Antonia, Marie Antoinette: The Journey. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. 2001 Jackson, Kathy Merlock and Mark West, Disneyland and Culture: Essays on the Parks and Their Influence. McFarland & Co, Jefferson, N.C. 2011 Lainsbury, Andrew, Once Upon an American Dream: The Story of Euro Disneyland. University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. 2000 Zega, Andrew, Versailles: The Chateau and Its Satellites. Conaissance et Mémories, Paris.

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All photography by the author.