MixedBook Post... sprightly ... Snow peels back the glossy Be Our Guest façade to reveal Walt Disney’s comfort with risk ... Snow’s energetic prose and quick passage through the biographical preliminaries are welcome, but as Disney’s Land progresses he loses sight of the overarching narrative. What should be a tick-tock transforms into a grab bag ... after a while the parade of bright young men and their mechanical, engineering and plumbing problems becomes numbing ... Snow is at his best when he analyzes the way Disneyland has influenced culture beyond the initial idea of a kinder, cleaner amusement park ... When a contemporary entertainment innovator like the Museum of Ice Cream’s Maryellis Bunn says she wants to be the millennial Disney, it isn’t the false fronts of Disneyland’s Main Street that she’s talking about but instead the idea of creative control over the real world, from human interactions to color schemes. This is the changing-the-world part of the book’s subtitle, the complicated and compromised reality that Snow would have been smart to focus on. With fewer fun facts and more critique, Disney’s Land could, and should, have drawn out the parallels to the present-day multimedia environment. The LA Tidings had it right in 1955. Giant cash registers and million-dollar people traps are still clicking and clanging. Critics continue to ask, Daydream or nightmare?
Fiona MacCarthy
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewDo we need another architect hero? Gropius himself might cringe at [MacCarthy\'s] approach, as he spent much of his career working against the idea of the singular genius, and for an architecture that collaborated with many other fields. His roof and his curriculum gave other people room to develop their talents, and that’s a kind of building worth celebrating. MacCarthy doesn’t seem to appreciate the importance of collective innovation. Instead, she gives the reader a sea of names, the details of a surprising number of pre- and extramarital love affairs, leaving it to others to provide commentary on the work ... MacCarthy’s biography, from the cover and preface on, doesn’t read like a product of 2019. Heroism, romanticism, the singular designer—these are not the preoccupations of architecture and design history now ... The Bauhaus building, as an avatar of the school, and as a piece of architecture, is one of Gropius’s most important achievements. It deserves to be described in detail and in context ... This should be a career apex for Gropius, both individually and for the Bauhaus as a group, and MacCarthy speeds by ... MacCarthy gives short shrift to TAC [the Architects Collaborative] ... The lives and skills of Gropius’s partners hardly come alive. They seem like gray shadows compared with the Bauhaus students ... Yet TAC’s experiment with nonhierarchical leadership, its inclusion of women as equal partners, and Gropius and Harkness’s call to dismantle the cult of the lone male genius, are far more relevant to the discourse in architecture today than one man, one skyscraper.
