The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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M. Christine Boyer
2.7 | “Disneyfied” Times Square/42nd St.
unique visual identity but is reduced to nostalgic stereotypes. Borrowing
from a ubiquitous series of already determined and ordinary advertisements,
signs, and billboards, and even relying on the potential drawing card of
Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, Times Square has been incorporated into
a larger sense of assembled space, where all of its simultaneity and immediacy
can evaporate into astonishing imagescapes. Here, as the earlier commercial
entertainments of the diorama, panorama, and lantern slide shows
demonstrated, spectators thrill at the re-creation of the real, wondering at
the technical procedures that convincingly transport them into an experience
that in fact may never have existed. But now, in contemporary times,
designers bring all of their information-processing abilities into play in order
to demonstrate the technical and organizational power of planning regulations
and design controls that can turn the material form of the city into
such an effective illusion. The result is similar to any successful magic show:
spectators are doubly thrilled when the illusion is produced by invisible
means, when the prosaic world can be reenchanted and disbelief suspended—albeit
for a moment.