Theme Park 101 - Informed Design

The Wild West

When we think about the iconic Wild West town, the one from the movies, the one from countless high noon shoot outs, we are thinking about a very specific style of architecture. The flat wooden facades, the rustic early Victorian saloons, and the crackerbox buildings are all part of our mental picture of what the west was like, and it is how we are most likely to depict it. With the exception of a few similar examples in Australia, Wild West buildings are easily recognized by people all over the world and they can instantly transport an audience to a very specific time and place.

When given the job of creating a themed place knowing a little background information regarding WHY they look the way they do can add depth to your design and inform your choices as you work. Buildings in the old west look the way they do because of an equal mixture of necessity and the aesthetics of the time. Imagine the rush to the West from the more cultivated East. Driven initially by a lust for gold, small towns sprung up wherever it was imagined there was an opportunity to strike it rich. These first towns were often populated by men, and having few resources at hand, these first buildings were likely to be tents. Lines of tents along a muddy road was what you would encounter if you were part of the first wave West. The buildings housing the barber, saloon, and the purveyor of supplies were likely to look alike. Wherever humans go they are most apt to try and recreate a little of what they left behind. Soon flat facades were added to the fronts of the tents, and rudimentary conveniences were included, like a place to wipe your muddy boots before you walked inside. The simple facades were a early attempt to reflect the architectural styles back home, but ultimately they were merely a front door for the tent, and a way to establish your business as unique among the others along that muddy street.



Later on a wooden structure was added to the facade, replacing the tent. This was done as much to keep the elements at bay, as to help secure your stock or belongings. Once the trains started west, exotic supplies such as window glass and wood stoves would be added, creating comfort and light. When women began to populate the west, demands for refinement and more of the comforts left in the east were forced upon the buildings and towns, and so you get a steady progression of improvements that bring us to the present day. When designing a western set or themed land, giving a nod to the details that are facts of the historical evolution of the place will only add depth to its design. Knowing “why” people did things the way they did is also a way to imaging the story of “who” made the choices. What were they trying to recreate? How did their facade communicate the quality of the products and services they offered? All the motivations that drive business people today were present back then, their only limitations were the materials at hand.

Eccentric Victorians

Growing up in San Francisco I was surrounded by lavish Victorian houses, many with odd collections of styles and eras applied to their surfaces. This is another example of how the places we live in are sometimes influenced by choices made in unconventional ways. In the late 1800’s, it was possible to purchase an entire house from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Giant Queen Anne mansions could be had for just over $2000, and erected on site. Also available in the Sears catalog were countless doors, windows, and details, each purchasable ala cart. Never wanting to leave a good thing alone, many home purchases were accessorized, often by the lady of the household, with little architectural knowledge or discretion. Doors might be added to dormers, window styles mixed from several eras, and any number of incompatible gingerbread trims could be draped over every surface.  What we consider Victorian charm was just as likely to cause a stomach ulcer inside a typical Victorian architect.

When designing a Victorian facade, keeping in mind this historical proclivity towards “do it yourself” home design leaves your work wide open for storytelling opportunities. Who lives here, and why did they make the choices they did when building their home or business? It is possible to get carried away (in a good way), but  when used sparingly it can infuse your design with a lot of rich storytelling possibilities.

Baroque on the Prairie

Circus’ in the 21st Century can range from primary colored clowns to Cirque du Soleil, but in their heyday they were traveling affairs that brought big sized entertainment to often very small towns. For people who had never seen a tiger before, having the circus roll into town, on wagons or by rail, was about as exotic an experience as they could ever dream of. For the promoters of the circus, they wished to bring with them a show that rivalled the very best the world could offer, but within the limitations of the medium. Having to constantly erect, tear down, and transport an entire show meant that a lots of the decor was painted on surfaces that could be folded up.

At the very height of Baroque and Georgian festooned grandeur were the extravagant opera houses and theaters located throughout the great cities of Europe, arguably the most famous being the Paris Opera house. In their way, the circus attempted to create their own palaces of wonder in vacant lots, fields, and fairgrounds all over the United States. Through the use of theatrics, canvas, and paper mache, it is easy to see the influence places like the Paris Opera House had on the design of circus tents, side shows, and graphics. For several nights in the summer a fabric edifice would rise from the corn fields, then pack up again and head to the next town.

It is all too easy to imagine a circus that reflects the many ways this form of entertainment has eroded over time, with a reputation of tawdriness and road weariness, but looking back to its roots, the Circus as canvas opera house spilling out of train cars and onto dry grass is a much richer pool to pull your inspiration from. Like the Wild West town, or the bizarre Victorian ornamentation, digging into the how and why of a place can feed your design work much more effectively than approaching the surface of your subject alone.

Theme Park 101 - A Stick in the Eye

We have all heard about the fashion designer that gasps at the sight of a plaid placed near stripes, or the chef that reels at the thought of the wrong wine served with an entree. Call this the curse of the connoisseur, or perhaps the “design Nazi”, but once you become acquainted with the rules of a specific industry you also become sensitive to those times when these rules are so unforgivably broken. Imagineers call this “bad show”, suggesting that a design choice has failed to support the Story that is being told. Architects might rail against an inappropriate material used within a space, and an artist might point out an unforgivable tangent in the composition of a work of art. Themed spaces can suffer from equally poor choices, and although these may merely make your audience question the authenticity of your environment, they can cause tangible harm to a fellow designer.

While sitting at a gas station in Ukiah California, my poor innocent eyes were struck by the addition of a detail added to the walls of the adjacent Food Mart. Not content with having butchered an attempt at a stucco recreation of Craftsman architecture, they decided to include the sort of feature customarily saved for family owned Mexican restaurants. They added broken bricks to surface, successfully achieving a Holstein Cow effect, but utterly failing to understand how or why this might happen within an adobe structure. Someone climbed a ladder or scaffold and deliberately applied these bricks like contact paper to the surface of the stucco. Although I might forgive the guy who applied the bricks, I have to question what was going through the minds of the contractor, architect, and client that looked upon this and thought, “hey, that’s pretty cool”.

Without going into too much detail, adobe walls are customarily built with mud bricks. These are then covered with a smooth layer of mud and hay, and if the mud cracks it can expose the bricks underneath. In the case of this gas station the bricks have been applied to the surface suggesting that the perpetrator hadn’t a strong notion of what he was trying to replicate. This most often happens when attempting to recreate architectural details from the past. This can include things like Half Tudor that fails to understand the structural nature of the timbers and more often than not are applied to the surface. Attempting to recreate a castle using cinder block is another themeing offense, with the king of all royal abominations being the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas which takes a Fisher Price approach to medieval architecture.

Apart from being a complete design snob, I am all for fun fantasy details in real world architecture, but the history of these building materials is just too interesting to ignore outright. What makes a themed structure believable is that it is consistent with our ideas about what it represents. The older the building the more weathered it will be, and if your goal is to fool the eye into believing it is looking at real building materials, not just applied sheets of bricks, then you need to go out of your way to make those materials as much like the real thing as possible. It is too easy to imagine your audience is too dumb to notice such details, but know that by going that extra mile, you don’t have to depend on that imagined lack of knowledge to transport them to the time and setting you are spending so much money to recreate.

A Tourist in Columbia

 I consider myself a game player rather then a dedicated “gamer”. Computer games for me are most often an opportunity to explore, and clearing rooms of enemies a necessary evil of the process. Like any good movie, book, or theme park attraction, my needs are simple. I wish to be transported to worlds I otherwise could never visit, and do things I could never do. All too many games, no matter how graphically rich, are little more than elaborate jungle gyms filled with monsters for me to shoot at. It is rare when an environment is so rich with Story that the game player finds themselves “changed” by the experience. Irrational Games' recently released Bioshock Infinite is one of those games, and I cannot help but gush a little about the world Ken Levine and his team has gifted us with.

 For those uninitiated or non-game players, Ken is responsible for creating the Bioshock series, which began with the creation of the Original Bioshock, an elaborate art deco dystopia at the bottom of the ocean. Unlike most games, rather then creating the architectural equivalent to an oil rig, the original Bioshock gave us the art and culture of places like Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler building, and the Titanic, and mixed in an Ayn Rand social experiment gone horribly wrong. Bioshock Infinite delivers us to another attempt at Utopia in the form of the floating city of Columbia. Like a mix of Main Street USA and a Fourth of July bunting festooned nightmare, Columbia is likely the best theme park environment ever conceived.

Armed with various weaponry, I weaved through this story, but with my camera in hand, talking screenshots as I went. As the dream of Columbia crumbles around me like the portrait of Dorian Gray, I found it all too easy to compose stunning shots along the way. This was made easy because the environments are painstakingly composed and art directed to enhance every aspect of my experience. Using every design principle ever formulated by artists, architects, game builders, theatrical set designers, and theme park producers, Columbia is dripping with story driven attention to detail. It could be argued that this alone is quite enough, but for those willing to take the journey all the way to the end, the player participates in a story arch that pulls them into a drama worthy of the very best science fiction literature.

 If I have one regret it is that I cannot recommend this lavish experience for everyone. Ken Levine’s chosen canvas is the medium of the first person shooter, and although I would argue this experience is as close to high art as any great novel or film, it is infused with action and violence. If the only way one could experience the world of Harry Potter was to be forced to wonder the halls of Hogwarts with a machine gun and rocket launcher, you can see how inappropriate the medium might be for some. That aside, video games deserve to entertain, immerse, and inspire, and Bioshock Infinite does all that. For those out there that have any interest in designing video game or real world environments, Bioshock Infinite is required for your education, not just because it is a storytelling work of art, but because it will be referenced from now on as the game all other immersive storytelling environments will be judged against.

Theme Park 101 - Architectural Believability

As human beings, we have developed a keen inner sense of the world around us. In many ways this is to help us navigate our environment, and to create ideas and relationships about the people and places that we encounter along the way. One area that we have strong inner feelings about is the relationship of the parts that make up the human face. When we are exposed to a face that includes any part that deviates from what we consider “normal” or expected, we approach it with caution. In this example the eye on the right side of this person’s face is lower than the eye on the left. We can’t help but sense that this is “wrong” and despite the fact that this is only a line drawing, we might find the image slightly off putting. Even if we don’t have an academic understanding of the structure of the human skull, we do know that there has to be something seriously broken for this one eye to appear so low on the face.


Amazingly, we also have an internal barometer when it comes to the imagined internal structure of buildings. Although we may not have conscious knowledge of how a building is constructed, we can react negatively to the sight of a building that seems to break our internal understanding of how things “should” be built. Our prejudice when it come to viewing faces comes from having seen so many in the course of our lives. The same is true of buildings. We have constructed an idea of what is safe or “real” based on how we refer to our interactions with the architecture we encounter throughout our lives. Like the human face, structures have a face of their own, and seeing elements that break our understanding of how buildings work are often reacted to with suspicion, and in the case of theme parks, a belief that these structures are somehow “fake” or unreal.

In these two examples, we see that one of the windows is placed in a position that fights with our basic understanding of how a building functions. We know that a two story building will be separated by a floor, and a window that intersects that imagined floor can draw attention to itself, at best, and feel “wrong” somehow at worst. There is the argument that this window could easily represent a stairwell winding its way from the first to second floor, but for the argument of this simple example, anything that needs you to contemplate the choices an architect or designer has made has the potential of drawing attention to itself and away from your overall design.

 This can also be true when we see that the elements that make of the “face” of a building are placed in a way that doesn’t “make sense” with our understanding of what buildings look like. Having windows that are over or under sized, or placed in a strange relationship to the overall structure, can look wrong and make us question the reality of the building. Even a structure that includes too many diverse styles or details can make us question the building’s believability.

PATTERNS

A reverse example of this comes when we try to theme a structure that has too obvious an internal skeleton. This happens most often when the structure has a function that dictates specific window placement over the goal of creating charm and complexity on the building’s surface. This can also occur when the budget of a project insists on a building only having one window size or style. In this example, a two story “box” building has windows of the same size, each evenly spaced. Trying to break this larger surface up into smaller themed facades will be challenged by our human ability to spot patterns in our environment. These western facades looks artificial because, despite the variety of facade surface treatments, we can easily make out the repeating pattern of the windows of the structure behind the facades. This will remind your audience that what they are looking at is not authentic, but an attempt at creating a themed space.

A good real world example of this is the French Quarter area of Disney's Port Orleans Resort in Walt Disney World. Whether driven by the project budget, or the designers unwillingness to push beyond the “rules” of building a hotel, this themeing loses its effectiveness and realism due to the strong pattern of same sized windows. At best, Port Orleans only suggests New Orleans, but fails to successfully transport us there in the way Disneyland’s New Orleans Square or the real French Quarter does so effectively.

Photo posted by faqorland

 In the final example, the same block building is clad with similar western themed facades, but in this case each building includes windows of various sizes, each themed to their individual facades. There is still a sense of the two end buildings having two stories, but the floor heights “appear” to be slightly different.

From inside the larger structure, the window sizes, heights, and locations have the feeling of being slightly eccentric, but this is an acceptable sacrifice when we compare it to the thematic benefits of how they appear on the exterior. I have also indicated that each of these themed facades have their own surface depth. This can add cost to a structures, but again, the overall effect of light and shadows on the surface, and a sense of structural complexity, will better support the story you are trying to tell. Best yet, the entire structure now supports your story, rather than allowing architectural limitations to draw your guests out of the place you are trying to transport them to.

Claude De Jongh - View of London Bridge from the West - circa 1632

A favorite painting of mine is Claude De Jongh's depiction of London Bridge. Looking close at the architectural details, it is easy to imaging that this variety of surface detail could be applied to one larger structures, but the placement of facade details and window locations suggest far more complexity then is structurally there.

Claude De Jongh - View of London Bridge from the West - Detail

Theme Park 101 - Tension

Whether creating a physical space or a virtual world, if the intention is to tell a story then there are certain tricks of the trade that are born from our audience’s familiarity with the physical world.  When we say, “You know, that bridge doesn’t look safe”, we are building this idea about the bridge based on the fact that we have experience with bridges that ARE safe. From infanthood we have been analyzing the physical world around us to help us navigate it safely. Anything out of the ordinary, or even slightly different than what we are familiar with, will trigger a sense of drama, suspense, and even comedy. This very human trait is what designers of physical spaces have at their disposal, and used with intention, can enhance the experience of your guests.

When telling a story in a physical space, Tension can be used to suggest that something is about to happen, something potentially dangerous to the guest, without actually putting them in any peril. Purely by how you arrange the pieces in your environment, you can tell a story with relatively little expense, and often without costly animations or effort.

In the above example, the rock formation on the left is “interesting” and might draw the attention of a guest. The balancing rock is curious without being impossible to imagine happening in nature. The middle example shifts the stone off balance a bit, cantilevering it over the central pillar stone. To the eye this feels precarious, so much so that even looking at a simple sketch of it can create a minor sense of anticipation. Forcing a path under such a rock, or driving a roller coaster under it is enough to add an extra thrill, without there being any real danger. The last example is more far fetched, but it does suggest that we are playing with the audience a little, and that they are “in on the joke”. The rock doesn’t need to animate, rock back and forth, or teeter, the arrangements of the pieces are enough to illicit a specific emotion.

Tension can also come from anticipation of a near future event. In the second example, the elephant on the left is hovering over a tiny chair. The elephant’s weight is distributed in such a way that we are pretty sure the chair is not going to fare well from the encounter. The elephant on the right has sat on the chair which is straining under its weight. Although this example is funny, it only works because we set up the scene with the previous image, otherwise it is hard to read what is happening. The “sweeter” of the two frozen moments is the elephant on the left. Although the moment is static we are entertained by the anticipation and building tension of future events, even if we will never actually see it happen. This can also be used in creating spaces. Building a sense of Tension in a themed space allows your audience to actively deduce what is going on, and how they should react to it.

Even the arrangement of bold architectural elements can tell us a lot about how we should “feel” about the place we find ourselves in. These two examples show two simple blocks, one has a surface that angles away from the guest, the other towards the guest. Since the surface angling away is unlike most architecture we encounter during our average day (unless we work near the base of a pyramid) we find it curious, but not necessarily dangerous. The “body language” of the building is passive, even approachable. The other building shape aggressively leans outwards, like a bully in a playground, it looks like it wants to pick a fight with the guest. Although purely simple blocks, these sorts of design decisions can say a lot about how you want the guests to “feel” about an environment.

How a space or its details are angled or arranged can say a lot about what your guests can expect to experience, without having to use more expensive tricks to achieve the same ends.

Disney parks are filled with such masterfully designed details, but one in particular comes to mind as a very favorite example of creating Tension with little or no expense. The now extinct World of Motion pavilion in EPCOT was filled with vignettes of “great moments” in the history of humans getting themselves around. Many of the scenes were textbook examples of theatrical vignettes that hold a story with little need for elaborate animations. My favorite appeared in the scene depicting the introduction of the bicycle, in the late 19th century. Animatronic figures dressed like Gibson Girls and mustache wearing dapper gents are experiencing the joys (and dangers) of a bicycle outing in the park. One such vignette included a man who is off his bicycle and is pumping air back into his tire. His gaze is distracted as he pumps so he is not aware that a huge bubble has appeared in the rubber and it is poised to burst. Behind the bicycle is a young woman with a surprised expression and eyes glued to the bulge in the tire. The two figures are little more than shop mannequins without costly Animatronic complexity. The only animation include the arms of the man who is continuously pumping, and the very subtle blink of the eyes on the young woman. Nothing more is needed, and yet we all know what is about to happen next! Although the man pumped the tire for a couple decades, we all are entertained by what we know is a very human moment. We are “let in on” the story, but we are not handed the outcome, we don’t need to be.

A Miracle!

Okay, this never happens... I cleaned my desk.  Not only that, I flipped the surface so the side that has faced the floor for the last 18 years now resides on the top. Gone are the countless coffee spills, splattered ink, x-acto cuts, and wear. Now I have to deal with the unexpected sense of intimidation, like having a $30 sheet of watercolor paper in front of you. Soon enough a coffee ring will remove any preciousness it might have, and I will cover every square inch of the surface with paper and books. The biggest surprise when I cleaned it off after all that time? It's made of WOOD!?

Doodle Sketchbooks

 

Sometimes the only opportunity I have for drawing stuff for myself is when I am away from my desk and keyboard. I keep these little sketchbooks near the TV in the living room, purely to as vessels for doodles. I try new pens and pretty much draw whatever pops in my head. Here is where I experiment, and with luck things learned in these books make it back to the work in my studio. The little Moleskine book in the upper left corner is my daily diary sketchbook. I am three years into doing these which take about 6 months to fill.