This Week in Laundry

Tech, Travel, Design, and Domestics.

Nature and Culture in Theme Park Design

Living: New York Moore Hostel, Bushwick (Morgantown), Brooklyn, NY

Working: Rough Draft NYC Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, NY

Laundry: Megawash Bushwick Laundromat

This week in laundry nature and culture combine in theme park design.

I’ve come to New York. The Themed Entertainment Association hosts the SATE conference later this week in Manhattan.

But before that begins, I’ve a couple of days in a Hostel and a Coworking space in Brooklyn.

New York Moore Hostel in Bushwick

New York Moore Hostel in Bushwick

It’s strange to be in New York. To be here conducting business as usual. It’s strange how easily I got into the city. Got to my hostel. I took the train from Philly. Then transferred to the subway. The whole trip was remarkably without stress or hassle.

The infamous New York Subway

The infamous New York Subway

The few hours on the train and subway afforded more opportunity to reflect during travel. At least compared to driving. And since the target of my destination here in New York is so definitely tied to the creation of immersive experiences – to the theme park – the two interwove in a hazy dream.

So hear in laundry those thoughts solidify to text.

Many of my washing posts reflect on US cultures. On the regional differences between those cultures. How many places hold a feeling unique unto themselves. Whether by weather, the people, the accents, the food, the cultural customs, the nature of the region, or the man made counterpoint in architecture. Each place is unique and different.

And much as the US is divested in these unique microcultures across the various lands of America, so too are the unique themed lands of the theme park. In fact, it is these uniquely themed lands, apart from each other, yet unified under the banner of the park at whole, that differentiate the theme park from the amusement park. Like the difference between Disneyland and Cedar Point.

Design is no easy task. This is why there are entire schools devoted to the art of design itself. Some forms of design trace a history through millennia, like woodcraft, textile, and architecture. Some forms of design flourish yet in their nascent stages, like web design and user experience. So too is the case with theme park design. It borrows heavily from other disciplines, but only a handful of scholarly programs cater to the craft directly, and as I argued in Disneyland and the Cahiers, park design still lacks a form of academic criticism.

Since the design of immersive spaces starts with the design of space – and people in those spaces – we often root the craft within the realm of architecture. Vijay Sehgal, of FSY architects, once defined architecture to me as the study of people in space. So in this sense, the architecture of the park is the design of the people within that space. The design of that space for those people in it.

The sculpted space of Central Park

The sculpted space of Central Park

But when articulating the defining characteristics of the park – those aspects that set each land unique to the other – what is it that we find to define these separate spaces? How do we differentiate the lands?

To me, the wanderer of that vast land of the United States, it could not be clearer. If people belong to the park, and we design the park for those people, then the defining differentiating characterizes of the park’s lands should leverage those things which define and differentiate America as a whole. Those things which exist and arise undesigned through both nature and culture. The cornerstones of any place’s tone.

Culture manifests in many forms to shape a location’s general feel. Like the way people greet each other in Pittsburgh. Or food culture like I noted last week in Philadelphia.

There also exists that ever present and obvious influencer of the tone in any space – the architecture. Whether that’s the ancient brick in Boston’s West End, the Italianate in Cincinnati, or the natural pinewood cabins in the mountains outside of Denver and Boulder.

Or the Frank Gehry pieces I keep stumbling across throughout the country – everywhere from Cleveland to Seattle to Boston to New Haven.

These instances of architecture, a form of cultural expression, likely influence a physical location’s tone and texture more than any other cultural expression. And theme park design formally acknowledges this – architectural design holds as a focus. It gets its own letter in the SATE acronym. And often receives its own department, or develops through an outside firm on a project.

And then there's Central Parkitecture

And then there’s Central Parkitecture

But it’s not the only factor influencing a space’s feeling. Just like all these places gain their tone through all sorts of man created cultural expression.

Nature and resources, on the other hand, influence a place’s feeling in more subtle ways than culture. I talked about this slightly in the Pleasure of New Places and Industry in Nature. When I talk about this other quality, I usually talk about it through my impression of it, my impression of a feeling of a space. Like the feeling of Newstalgia.

Scattered about many of my posts are hints and clues of nature at work, influencing a location’s tone in one way or another. Whether it’s talking about local food culture as a response to the availability of natural resources. Or the calmness of people’s manner in Seattle as a response to the soft rain. Or even in this post with the building of homes in pine, as a result of construction in the pine rich northwoods or pacific northwest.

It is the weather. The resources. The mountains. The plains. The geology. The flora. The fauna. It is nature. Each of these things contributes directly in sculpting the tone of the place. And further through a people’s culture. Because those cultures exist not ignorant to those resources, but in response to it. Built through history. Conveyed through time.

So in the design of the separate lands – each with a wholly fantastic and unique theme – it makes perfect sense to take these two influencers, nature and culture, as the primary drivers in the design. In order to properly shape the tone of that land in a form for human consumption that we might find both digestible and enjoyable.

We know this to be the right approach in our design of artificial spacial tone because these are the elements which naturally create the tone and regional differentiation in each these unique lands of the great United States.

And yes Architecture’s a part of that. Because architecture is a cultural component, strongly shaped through history by the availability of resources, the needs of the local people, and the happenstance of the moment. But while Architecture may present itself as the largest and most obvious shaper of space through culture, it is not the only expression of that culture.

In many ways, as I mentioned in my last post, food and language are likely the strongest markers of regional culture. At least between the US microcultures. So too they are likely to strongly shape the tone in each unique land in the park.

New York's got some food culture like no other. Roberta's in Morgantown

New York’s got some food culture like no other. Roberta’s in Morgantown

As well as nature. You cannot ignore nature. Not just because it’s unignorable, but because through resource availability nature ends up having a hand in just about every regional cultural differentiator. Food, architecture, textile, social hierarchy, technological development, and likely even language and writing are all influenced by a local region’s natural resources.

In a park, nature itself is hard to control. The nature around the park will exist wherever we build that park. Los Angeles will be hot and dry. It will have earthquakes. Florida will be hot and humid. There will be hurricanes. Southern California has drought, desert, and the vegetation and wildlife to reflect that. Likewise Florida has lush sub-tropic flora and crocodiles. California has mountains. Florida has sinkholes.

And while you can’t shake the weather and geology in the location where you build your park, you can definitely create the outcomes of different geology and weather. This may be the most overtly unnatural expression of theme in the park. Want to create a mountainous desert in Southern Florida? Simple – use desert like plants, deprive them of water, and then use cement and paint to create fake rockwork – like big thunder mountain. Use fake plants if you need to. Take the nature for the theme you’re designing for, and assume the outcome in terms of horticulture and geoculture – cultivated vegetation and geology.

Now take that notion, and extend it to culture. What kinds of culture would develop in these places? What kinds of architecture serves this weather, built with respect to the available resources? What kinds of textile does the same? How would people talk? What would they wear? In these cases, there are more than just natural influencers. There’s history. There’s a backstory. Of where the people came from. Of people’s prior cultures. Culture that came to a place and transformed. Or slowly built in a single location over thousands of years. This is the nature of culture.

In this later, as Americans, we bring the weight of our own cultural expectations. In some senses, you might call these stereotypes. They are our cultural perceptions of other cultures. Their architecture. Their food. Their way of speaking. Other cultures carry these same alternate impressions – they aren’t reflections of the true culture, they are digestions and simplified interpretations of other cultures against their own. It is a part of their culture. Just like it is a part of ours.

And depending on the targeted audience and intended experience, the design of the park reflects this. We take these cultural assumptions, digestions, and reinterpretations not of the original culture, but of the guests’ culture’s impression, and use this reinterpretation in the design.

Like the Greek Revival architectural style in the modern American culture. If you were to see this style in a park, as an American, the primary tonal impression wouldn’t be of Athens. It would be of American banking and government. Because in America banks and legislatures have been reappropriating this architectural style since the American revolution. I just saw the Second Bank in Philadelphia. This is what I mean by cultural reappropriation.

As immersive storytellers, we must understand this and use it to our advantage. We are, after all, designing for a target audience. They have their own culture. They bring the baggage of that culture with them. And all the meanings learned through that culture all their life, whether they be five or fifty-five or one hundred and five.

Cream cheese and Greek Revival aren’t the only textures of culture I found in Philadelphia. Quite by accident I wandered past Pier 9 while walking into the old city last Saturday. There I found an installation piece by Ann Hamilton as part of her residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Towering curtains of Tyvek, draped in cylinders, constructed kinematically with bell pulleys. People strolled about the piece while children ran and played. They each in turn spun the giant columns of cloth by pulling on hoisted rope. The columns floated at play with the air cut cross the pier’s bay doors. A ballet of tapestry. Of kinesthetic aesthetic. As cloth constructed in an architecture.

Ann Hamilton's Habitas at Pier 9 in Philadelphia

Ann Hamilton’s Habitas at Pier 9 in Philadelphia

Ann articulates that textile plays a fundamental component in cultural expression. Because textiles serve such a fundamental role to a person through clothing, and as artistic expression. As an industry, we call the latter fashion.

In all my US wanderings textile had never reached out to me as a strong signifier of regional microculture.

That’s because jeans and t-shirts are jeans and t-shirts, everywhere you go in the US. Business suits are business suits. From Seattle to Denver to Orlando. I never noticed the cultural difference in textile.

Except perhaps outside of Teddy Roosevelt National Park – in the dress of the cowboy – the long boots. The Stetsons. A saw a similar fashion in a minority population when I was in Austin. So I suppose at a minimum there’s regionally isolated textile expression of cowboy culture.

And yet somehow I always saw that as a special other rather than genuine cultural expression. For me it holds a romantic connotation. It carries with it an idealization more than an actuality. The cowboy garb seems to me to share a root with the costumes of Fronteirland. Wearing those garments today is a nod to a bygone area much more than a modern mode of dress.

But that’s because I’m from outside the cowboy culture rooted in those local regions. Much like a re-appropriation of the Greek style, it is a personal impression of a culture which is not my own. Which helps explain why I never genuinely saw it before.

And while the cultural dress of the cowboy in modern cowboy culture may be regionally pocketed, I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t more examples of textile based cultural expression.

The answer to that question lies with another – in the US, does culture vary more than just regionally? The answer is yes, of course it does. I’ve written about it before. Culture varies drastically by both race and class. And here in America those two groups are often linked together.

In many ways, textiles become the most immediate signifiers of culture. On any given day in a modern metro, a businessman and a homeless man might share the same square meter. As a stranger, just looking at the two, how do you tell which is which? The answer is immediate, and everyone knows it. The businessman wears a suit. The homeless man wears soiled tatters.

And like many other forms of cultural expression, this form of cultural expression is a mixture of both resource availability and happenstance. The difference between classes is defined by access to resources. One can afford nice clothes. The other cannot.

But there’s a mark of happenstance as well. That somehow through time the modern wool suit has become the textile expression of business culture. So much so that it overrides personal comfort. 100 degrees and humid? Rather than abandoning this cultural signifier – the business suit – for more appropriate textiles in reflection of the weather – shorts, and breathable material – we instead build skyways and hyper-air-condition them. So we don’t have to go outside. So that we can maintain our suit culture.

Textiles are so central to the differentiation of culture between classes that we use textiles as a symbol for those classes. We do so whenever we talk about blue collar and while collar. The color of the collar – the expression of a textile – acts as a flag, differentiating these two distinct cultural groups through the color of a textile to become an emblem of the classes.

Great theme parks leverage textiles in sculpting a land’s textural tone. It may very well be next in line to architecture in terms of modern effectiveness in execution. For great parks use great costumes, incredibly distinct to each unique land. Futuristic in Tomorrowland. Academically adventurous in Adventureland. Colonial in liberty square. Wizard’s robes in Hogsmead. In each these areas, textiles serve as a distinct cultural artifact, artificial in nature, yet incredibly effective in separating the unique feeling of each land.

The Magic Kingdom isn't the only place with colonial liberty. Or lines. The line outside Freedom Hall. Whence was signed the Declaration of Independance. And the constitution.

The Magic Kingdom isn’t the only place with colonial liberty. Or lines. The line outside Freedom Hall. Whence was signed the Declaration of Independence.

While the parks do a fantastic job with leveraging cultural signifiers of architecture and textiles to paint tone to a land, what about other cultural identifiers? Are they effectively used?

Last week I spoke about how important a role food plays in differentiating culture. One would think this would translate as a tool to the park in differentiating the lands. And it does play a small role. At Disneyland, you can get shish-kabab at the Bengal Barbecue – a unique food vendor to Adventureland. In New Orleans square, there’s Cajun. There is some variation – and it is thematically tied to the land to help act as a differentiator.

On the other hand, no matter where you go, you can get a hamburger. Fries. Deep fried fish. Turkey legs. Pizza. They might be named differently. They might have architectural elements in the dining establishments to reflect the land. And yet, because this faire is ever-present throughout the park, it is ununique. It homogenizes the lands. In blends them together, and works against each themed land’s uniqueness, by unifying each land’s feel through a common food culture. And since food is one of the strongest cultural signifiers, it does so in a strong way.

I have a feeling this is done out of necessity more than anything else. Out of a need to cater to the audience’s desires. Some people just won’t give up their hamburgers in the US. Just like some people can’t give up their fishballs in Hong Kong. Which is why Disneyland Hong Kong started selling the local specialty a few years after opening.

I also have a hope that there’s room for more innovation – room to push the envelope. To add more magic to each unique land by specializing the food in a cultural reflection of that particular themed area.

And while this might come at the cost of ridding guests of comfortable familiar faire in these distinct lands, there’s no need to remove such food from the park all together. The central entry and hub in any park serves as a root between all lands, as well as a comfortable point of entry for each guest. Often the entry hub’s theme plays on newstalgia more than any other land in the park. In the flagship Disney parks, this is Main Street USA.

Much as the entry hub employs architecture to bridge the park’s more fantastic lands with a familiar point of reference, so too could this land employ cuisine to the same effect. Here the comfort foods of the common culture, soaked in a bit of newstalgia, may thrive. And by extension, push the unique cuisines of all other lands apart to new heights. Much as the World’s Fair area of Epcot achieves this with great success, so too could all lands benefit from this fundamental cultural signifier.

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter serves as an exception to this trend. And a great example of thematic food executed with cultural consistency. Butterbeer. Gillywater. Even the authentic pub faire at the Three Broomsticks or the Leaky Cauldron. Nothing is out of place. And nothing can be found elsewhere in the park. It is but one component supporting one of the best executed theme park lands. And it serves the point well.

These are only examples. The tip of the iceberg in terms of design. Through environmental considerations both natural – based in weather, geography, and other resources – and cultural – a sweeping history of happenstance highly influenced by those natural resources – we create unique lands. Unique experiences. By focusing our design on any significant element and expression of nature, culture, or both in combination. And every detail counts.

Ornamental details in Central Park

Ornamental details in Central Park

Just like every wash counts. As I finish up this week’s wash, I can only dream of the immense facilities it must take to wash every textile at a modern theme park resort. Everything from cast costumes to bed linens to the heavy drapes that adorn many stage based attractions. I can only dream, and imagine. But for now, all I have is this laundromat. And in a few minutes, I’ll have it no longer.

Torpedoes Away - the forward torpedo room in the Independce Seaport Museum's Submarine Becuna - a genuine WWII era relic

Torpedoes Away! – the forward torpedo room in the Independce Seaport Museum’s Submarine Becuna – a genuine WWII era relic

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