The ridiculous blue building. The second level window/door things that make no sense because there is an actual door right there for scale. Flower boxes are being installed at the bottom that would block the shutters from being closed.
Yup, I caught it right after I posted. We truly live in a post-Riviera world.
That is a very good comparison. Mickey Ave is a similarly disjointed mess of scale and proportion. Like far too many recent projects it was designed with this idea that forced perspective is just making things smaller, but there is no consistency in how things are made smaller or how they relate to other objects that provide a reference to scale. That's part of what is so maddening about the blue building. That second level door sets a scale that is not kept consistent within the facade itself but also the adjacent grey facade. They're adding a crane above the door which is itself not something unusual but it establishes a references for the second level floor. The height of the windows establishes a very tall floor-to-ceiling height with the flower boxes being just under eye level blocking your view out of the window. If the windows aren't oddly high, then there's a weird split level thing going on but that means you hoist something into the door and then still have to carry it up a few feet of stairs, and the whole point of the door is to skip the stairs. These same 7 foot tall windows are on the third floor, which is fine except that the grey facade tries to use forced perspective for its third floor. Those windows are now obviously too small because there are larger windows immediately adjacent for comparison. The blue facade is this jumbled mess that tries to ignore the actual floors of the building of which it is a part and maintain the false levels of the green facade with the ridiculous cornice, but that effort at maintaining a certain scale is then immediately ignored.
This project is not alone in the issue being one of design and not budget. In some ways it is the problem of people wanting to be theme park designers. They study theme parks, not the real world and specialization means there is a disconnect between aesthetic “creative” design and infrastructural “facility” design. All of this is compounded by the inward, self-referential focus on being “Disney” instead of creating a place. How something should work is now of less concern as the environment is no longer an imitation of the real but a knowing imitation of the fake. There is no purpose beyond being ornament to be counted as “theme” has been reduced to a measurement of stuff.
I’m sure if they agree with you they will open it.
I disagree. I don’t think the goal is to “imitate the real.” The real is what we’re trying to escape from in a theme park. The imagination says Paris is a place of beautiful architecture, good food, great culture, etc. While the real Paris has all those things, it also has quite a bit of other shall we say less desirable elements that shouldn’t be replicated in a theme park. That’s why it’s important to imitate the “fake” as you call it. Play off what people think of when they hear “Paris.” This is IMO a successful design strategy for a theme park or any entertainment facility.
Romanticizing is not imitating the fake in the sense of my comments. The real is spaces occupied by humans. It's the difference between a window that is actually too small creating the illusion of being habitable and one that is obviously a small window with nothing behind it. When people think of Paris they don't think of inoperable shutters, bizarre split levels and fake Mansard roofs.
Thanks for the clarification. I agree with this statement.
Turn it into a DVC kiosk that sells cupcakes themed to ladders at construction sites.
Even another well-placed tree would work wonders here.
