National Parkitecture - Part 2.

December 20, 2017 by Dave Gottwald

Spending the time I did in Glacier National Park and at its lodges this past July got me thinking about how the NP brand identity and "Parkitecture" style has been repackaged as thematic design. Here is a look at three major Disney hotel resort projects that express and engage with that style.

Wilderness Lodge, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

Disney's Wilderness Lodge, Walt Disney World Resort

What happens when all the individual stylistic and era-specific quirks of the some dozen classic National Parks Lodges are condensed into one singular, heightened, sweetened experience? It should be obvious that only Disney could do it (or would do it).

Approach to the main entrance and Porte Cochere.

Disney's Wilderness Lodge at the Walt Disney World Resort outside Orlando, Florida is just such a condensation. The hotel is very popular, so much so that it has its own unofficial fan website. I took the following pictures during a visit in October 2007.

This was not the first Disney project to adopt a "Parkitecture" theme (see below), but it is the largest and most comprehensive. The design phase took place from 1989 to 1991, ground was broken in August 1992, and the hotel opened in May 1994. You can see here from the property map that the hotel consists of two wings which branch off from the central lobby building. The addition structures that run along to the south are cabin bungalows in a similar style which opened in 2000, part of Disney's ever-expanding timeshare business. Additions continue to be made to the property. The latest of these, the Copper Creek Villas & Cabins, opened just this past summer, in July 2017.

Denver architect Peter Dominick drew upon primarily the cues of the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone, the Ahwahnee Hotel at Yosemite, Timberline Lodge (Mount Hood, Oregon), and lastly the Lake McDonald Lodge (which I visited while in Glacier). Disney seems to have felt that Dominick's lineage lent a certain credibility to the project—his father was a pioneering environmentalist and longtime Colorado senator. Dominick as architect of record was also augmented by two other Principals from his [then] firm Urban Design Group: Randal Johnson (Design) and Ronald D. Armstrong (Management).

Yet despite having a formal architect on the project, this was still thematic design—this was still show, in which architecture was just one component, a structural means to an end. At the lodge groundbreaking in the summer of 1992, Michael Eisner said “in our architecture, Disney continues to produce the kind of groundbreaking entertainment that keeps the Disney name magical to people around the world. Our architecture is part of the show” [emphasis added].

The design team on the project confirms that Mr. Eisner was very involved, and very hands on. “Michael reviewed the design completion and was involved in design presentations at each stage of the design process,” said Randal Johnson, as quoted in this excellent article by Chuck Mirarchi which details the entire development of the Wilderness Lodge at greater length.

Upon closer inspection, a corporate gloss becomes apparent, perhaps due to Eisner's influence. All surfaces are spotless (moreso even than at the most meticulously restored NPL properties) and somewhat modernistic. The exposed beams have been vigorously sanded down and saturated in thick coats of paint. The flooring also has a very contemporary cast.

Old Faithful Inn, Yellowstone / Wilderness Lodge, Walt DIsney World.

The most direct influence on the main building is Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn. Here is a vintage photograph of the Inn, compared with my shot of the Wilderness Lodge.

Vintage postcard of the Old Faithful Inn.

It's quite the direct lift, based on honest research. Mirarchi reports in the article I noted above that

An extensive amount of research went into the planning of the Wilderness Lodge. It began with the architects taking a tour of the National Parks including Yellowstone, Glacier and Yosemite. “These visits subsequently let to extensive research on the National Park System, the great western painters, indigenous peoples and western craftsman who helped shape the American west,” said Randy Johnson. “This influence shows up throughout the building—in the lobby floor, a Hopi storm pattern; in light fixtures and furniture, inspired by craftsman Thomas Molesworth; in the fireplace representing the strata of the Grand Canyon.”

Early concept sketch for the Wilderness Lodge. Ⓒ Urban Design Group, Inc.

Concept rendering for the Wilderness Lodge. Ⓒ Urban Design Group, Inc.

Once you enter the eight-story lobby, the lift from Old Faithful continues; pine railings imported from Oregon, carvings, fixtures, and lighting. Two massive 55-foot "authentic totem pole" columns contain Native American-inspired renderings of birds of prey, fashioned of standing dead Lodgepole Pine from Montana. I place "authentic" in scare quotes because that's what Disney calls the totems. Yet they were carved by Duane Pasco, a white guy raised in Alaska and Seattle, Washington. The birds' order from floor to ceiling is relative with their placement in the environment—at eye level with guests are field and meadow dwellers, rising up through alpine species and finally to the highest strata of eagles, falcons, and hawks.

The four 600-pound teepee chandeliers are actual rawhide, hand-painted with Native American iconography. Wilson & Associates served as the interiors and lighting design firm on the project.

Vintage postcard, Old Faithful Inn Lobby.

Early period photography demonstrates the very direct relationship the lobby of the Wilderness Lodge has the to the Old Faithful Inn.

The lodge's 82-foot chimney is in the very same same corner support position as at Yellowstone. It's the only element in the lobby that is fabricated, and was constructed and sculpted in place.

But then Disney starts mixing styles, references, and locales. After all, what does it matter? This hotel is in Central Florida; Yellowstone it ain't. The stonework of the fireplace depicts the strata of the Grand Canyon, with plenty of Native American accents. “Due to laws restricting the removal of material from National Parks, the fireplace was constructed...using similar materials,” said Christian Barlock, who worked on the project. “A paleontologist was hired to spend time in the Grand Canyon and document the strata and fossils. He then directed the construction of the fireplace at the lodge—including inserting actual fossils into the correct strata. This was done so we could ensure it was an accurate and successful representation."

There are cozy rooms off the main lobby that provide small moments of intimacy. Here the influence of Mount Hood's Timberline Lodge is more distinctly felt.

Look up, however, and we have the classic lantern chandeliers and enormous vaulted ceilings.

Faux-vintage postcard. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Like most Disney design projects, the Wilderness Lodge has an elaborate fictional backstory developed by the imagineers to help guide the creative process. In the earlier years of the lodge's operation, a fictional newspaper was distributed to guests upon check in, telling them of one (imagined) "Colonel Ezekiel Moreland" and his discovery of "Silver Creek Springs."

The faux-vintage newspaper once handed out to guests upon check in, The Silver Creek Star. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Unfortunately the backstory has since been forgotten. From The Forgotten Story of the Wilderness Lodge by noted Disney historian Jim Korkis:

The Wilderness Lodge no longer has a copy of the Silver Creek Star that was given so freely to guests over a decade ago. There is no documentation of this story in their “Big Book of the Lodge” that is used by the rangers who give the outstanding “Wonders of the Lodge” walking tour four days a week as a reference to answer guests’ questions. The vivid adventures of Colonel Moreland... have completely disappeared from Disney history in less than two decades along with so many other interesting tales that should be recorded for future researchers.

Even more detail about this backstory can be read here and here at the Disney-focused 2719 Hyperion blog.

View facing the rear facade of the hotel, to the southwest, away from Bay Lake.

As with all Disney resort properties, there is an abundance of artificial water features. The Wilderness Lodge has its own waterfalls, streams, and the Fire Rock Geyser (a kind of Old Faithful in miniature, complete with a regular schedule of eruption).

Even not counting the timeshare facilities, the resort is sprawling. 728 rooms total were initially built before those later expansions.

There is a kind of hybrid modernity at work here as well. Notice the roof structures; they appear of the sort you'd find at a contemporary upscale ski resort.

Or the sprawling retail locations of the Cabela's sporting goods chain, designed by Pennsylvania architecture firm Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates. I wonder if the team visited Wilderness Lodge; the similarity is uncanny.

These modern green roofs of the lodge look like they're designed to take the onslaught of snowy winters. Yet this is Central Florida. Dominick could have easily chosen to replicate the original rustic and charming shingle roof of the Old Faithful Inn—it certainly would not be damaged by weather as the original had. But he did not.

Native American iconography is all over the place. Sometimes it is used appropriately, sometimes not. This is the "Trout Pass Bar" serving poolside frozen margaritas and daiquiris. Despite such odd contexts, overall Disney seems satisfied with this dubious, appropriated integration of Native art. From Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture by Beth Dunlop (1st edition, 1996):

Beyond using typical rustic architectural motifs and western materials, Dominick sought to use his commission to express spiritual ideas about the West. He was able to do so, in part, by incorporating as much Native American legend as possible—on columns and totem poles and in patterns in the rugs—and perhaps even more in what was both the philosophical and the structural approach to Wilderness Lodge, by trying to ensure "a roughness and a trueness of how things were put together."

The clincher, however, is Dunlop's closing comment on the resort project. "At Wilderness Lodge, authenticity is the fantasy." [emphasis mine]

Sequoia Lodge, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

Disney's Sequoia Lodge, Disneyland Paris Resort

As I mentioned above, Wilderness Lodge was not Disney's first foray into the realm of the National Parks. Disney's Sequoia Lodge opened at the Disneyland Paris Resort (then EuroDisney) two years prior.

Five original onsite hotels for the Paris project were the result of a competition initiated by Michael Eisner, and the resulting projects were designed by such luminaries as Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, and Robert A. M. Stern. A sixth, the Disneyland Paris Hotel (which connects to the the entrance of the park and overlooks it), was deemed "too cute" for these notables, and was designed in-house by the imagineers. These following photos are from my March 2008 visit.

The Sequoia feels very 'modern' (or at least contemporary to the late 80s when it was designed) and not much connected to the American West. Most jarring is the rigid mirror symmetry (see the satellite view above). This formalism smacks of royal palaces like Versailles, not the lodges of the National Parks. The Sequoia Lodge might best be termed interpretive, whereas the Wilderness Lodge is stylistically more derivative. In terms of my own taxonomy of thematic design, the former is referential, and the latter is representational.

The main entrance with NPL-esque cobblestone columns.

The Sequoia was the only hotel not be designed by one of Eisner's competition winners; it was the conception of French architect Antoine Grumbach. Again from Dunlop's Building a Dream:

Grumbach drew the most romantic assignment, a hotel in the spirit of the great national park lodges of the American West, the same inspiration for Orlando's Wilderness Lodge. ...Sequoia Lodge is a heavy, dark, handsome hotel that the architect terms "an ecology building." It is surrounded by trees and, unlike most Disney buildings, is executed largely in natural materials: wood, stone, and copper.

Now here is where things get odd. Dunlop goes on to say, "In form and execution, it pays homage to Frank Lloyd Wright and Greene & Greene, as well as to the Arts and Crafts Movement in general."

Wright? Greene & Greene? Arts and Crafts Movement? What on earth does any of this have to do with the lodges of the National Parks? Dunlop merely concludes that "Sequoia Lodge, like Wilderness Lodge, is rooted in the early twentieth century architecture of the American West." To my thinking, that's an awfully wide net to cast—almost as nonspecific as saying a band draws its musical influences from "the major cities of the 1960s." One online review said, quite correctly, "Imagine if Frank Lloyd Wright designed Yosemite’s Ahwahnee." Which, I suppose, we can indeed imagine. It's just a strange dream to actually walk through. To use a musical metaphor again, this is not a remastering, or even a remix. This is a mashup; a design DJ taking Wright and spinning him together with Greene & Greene, with Arts and Crafts.

I only spent about an hour or so looking around the Sequoia Lodge, and I found plenty of Wright and Arts and Crafts, but very little "Parkitecture." There's no grand central lobby, no massiveness at all to speak of. The NPL style is all about grandeur, and I was hoping here, in the country that gave us the word, I'd find some.

Interior window treatments aping Wright.

Wright's iconic Prairie style leaded glass designs are featured throughout. This is the kind of "in the style of" stuff more commonly derived from name brand Renaissance masters like Leonardo Da Vinci (whose works are undoubtedly in the public domain at this point). Yet what happens when the artist being copied died in the middle of the last century—does the Wright estate need to approve such nods? Do they require authorization and compensation, like for the licensed products they sell at museums across the country? I don't know.

There are structural elements of Wright's DNA here as well. The hotel lobby's angled ceiling with exposed beams and large sun windows is rather reminiscent of Taliesin West, his winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Drafting room at Taliesin West. Wikimedia Commons. — Drafting room at Taliesin West. *Wikimedia Commons*.

Typical Mission 66-style structure: Petrified forest National Park. Flickr Creative Commons. — Typical Mission 66-style structure: Petrified forest National Park. *Flickr Creative Commons*.

I suspect this is also a subtle nod to Mission 66, the decade long expansion program 1956–1966 which brought many mid-century modern structures to the National Park System. But honestly, there was nothing NP "lodge" about Disney's Sequoia Lodge.

Moving on to Disney's more recent resorts in California; Wright, Greene & Greene, and the Craftsman / Arts and Crafts movement take center stage for an even greater departure.

Grand Californian, satellite view. Click for link. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

Disney's Grand Californian Hotel & Spa, Disneyland Resort

Disney's Grand Californian opened in 2001 as part of a colossal expansion to the Disneyland Resort which included a second theme park—Disney California Adventure—the Downtown Disney shopping district, the Mickey & Friends parking structure, and various other facilities and amenties.

Interestingly, the Grand Californian is again the work of a team lead by architect Peter Dominick. Beth Dunlop describes the resort in Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture (2nd edition, 2011):

The Grand Californian pays broad homage to the Arts and Crafts movement that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century and was a dominant influence on architecture throughout California. Though the hotel speaks directly to the work of such California architects as Bernard Maybeck and Charles and Henry Greene, it also evokes the memory of other designers including Frank Lloyd Wright and the Scotsman, Charles Rennie MacIntosh [sic].

Here is a "mashup" design which follows in the vein of the Sequoia Lodge project, but adds the grandeur of his Wilderness Lodge back in. And the grandeur, though welcome at (and appropriate to) a Disney resort, is a problem.

Not exactly a neighborhood Bungalow. Ⓒ Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Dominick spoke at the hotel's dedication on February 8, 2001 and noted how the vastness of the property and overall scale of the design was a departure from the domestic, small, intimate California Craftsman tradition:

Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel is perhaps the largest structure ever conceived in the Arts and Crafts style which has historically been residential in focus, size, and execution. And the garden was always the key influence in the design of Arts and Crafts structures. In this case we shifted the scale of the hotel to include the scale of the forest particularly those along California's coastlines with their Monterey pines and the spectacular groves of redwoods and sequoias providing an appropriate scale and inspiration for a project [this] immense. [emphasis mine]

Looking down into the lobby from the third floor.

The iconic, cavernous central lobby with dominant fireplace (ala Wilderness Lodge by way of Yellowstone) is back. Yet what stark contrast is this, to be in the Art and Crafts style which—as Dominick noted above—is small. It takes the quiet charm of the California Craftsman bungalow (even the larger 'ultimate bungalow') and amplifies it to crude shout across a parking lot. There are smaller moments, for sure, particularly at hotel check-in. Beth Dunlop notes in Building a Dream (2nd edition) that this first antechamber new guests encounter "is a tribute to San Francisco's exquisite Swedenborgian Church, which is considered to be the first Arts and Crafts structure in California."

Yet in sum, the Grand Californian feels as if someone had an enlarging ray gun and aimed it at the Gamble House, magically ballooning it to 948 rooms, with an additional 44 suites and 71 villas. While the scale is wrong, the details, however, are Wright.

In particular, Frank Llyod collides head on with California Craftsman style in the lighting and glasswork. These chandeliers would look rather well at home in any Prairie residence in the Chicago suburbs. Notice how the organic, floral forms (top upward facing sconces) are integrated with something akin to Wright's geometric, Japanese inspired forms and patterns (lower hanging lantern elements).

This was a subtlety I did not catch until my third or fourth visit to the hotel's lobby—Wright leaded glass designs of the Prairie variety, integrated into the balcony railing structure in front of these massive windows. When the sun wasn't at the best angle, I never noticed them. But when light hits the rear windows at full strength, all the bright colors of the Avery Coonley Playhouse windows shine through rectilinear forms that recall Robie House.

Typography throughout the resort reflects the California take on the Craftsman style, yet to my eye they could have gone for even greater authenticity. Although the typeface here appears to be an alteration of ITC Willow (based on the lettering of Charles Rennie Mackintosh) it has a late 90s California contemporary feel. Perhaps Disney was concerned about readability.

Exposed beams on the walkway to the pool area.

The exterior details, observed in micro, give a better feel of the California Craftsman home. The massive scale of the overall site is troublesome, but in moments like this you can focus in on the detail and try and forget how sprawling the place is. Dunlop acknowledges in Building a Dream (2nd edition) that this variety aids the design, observing "...the spaces are carefully manipulated—small and tight and then huge and soaring—to perfect effect. The bracketed, vaulted wood ceilings seem to embrace the spaces."

I'm still not sure why the Disney literature, and online reviewers, place this resort in the NP lodge thematic category. Big lobby, wood, trees. That's about the only shared elements. It's sort of the same comment made about the Sequoia Lodge; "What if architect A of school B in the style C... designed a National Parks lodge." Why not just design something entirely new? Or, as with Wilderness Lodge, make the relationship to the NPL "Parkitecture" style explicit.

The facade facing the Downtown Disney shopping district.

Of these three Disney resort developments, in my view only the Wilderness Lodge captures a notion of authenticity and clearly expresses the NPL "Parkitecture" style as effective thematic design.

As reimagined interpretations ("mashup" works), the Sequoia Lodge and the Grand Californian convey interest and creativity, certainly. It might be that trying to tie their visions to the NP lodge concept was a mistake. It's not required. For the typical visitor who is unaware of the references at play, the design "mashups" work because they reference aesthetics that have become so popular as to exist in the public imagination as brands do. Frank Lloyd Wright, even if you can't name a single one of his projects, has a style that has been so broadly projected, interpreted—consumed—as to become a theme all its own. The same for the Arts and Crafts / California Craftsman style, or the Greene & Greene look. It's in the bloodstream. And for those visitors more aware and perhaps more architecturally astute, it's like any mashup recording you'd hear of artists you are familiar with; you're either going to be charmed or horrified.

The iconic signage at the western entrance to Glacier.

National Parkitecture - Part 1.

December 17, 2017 by Dave Gottwald

Alright. Now begins a series of posts documenting (and inspired by) Themerica travels, summer 2017 edition. The first major stop on our journey east was Glacier National Park in Montana. I had been the summer prior, but this was the first visit for my fellow roadtripper David Janssen, Jr. It's a truly majestic place, and although it sits down at number ten for most visited National Parks, I'd easily place it up there with Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon.

Left to right: Lake McDonald Lodge, Many Glacier Hotel, and Glacier Park Lodge.

The park lies along the Canadian border, adjacent to that country's Waterton Lakes National Park. In 1932 Waterton Lakes was combined with Glacier to form the world's first International Peace Park. There are several historic hotels and chalets within and around Glacier, including the three main lodges indicated here on the map.

The style of the lodges are well known enough to inspire documentaries.

If you are unfamiliar with the lodges of the National Parks, they are sort of a genre all to themselves. Built in the first few decades of the twentieth century (including notable entries within National Forest land such as Timberline that were part of FDR's public works projects during the Great Depression years), these lodges stand exclusively in the Western United States.

What's curious is that despite being designed and built by different teams, on different sites, in different years, the National Park Lodges (NPL) share a kind of meta-aesthetic. I've seen it referred to as "Parkitecture" at various places online—and I love a good portmanteau—so I'll use that term. A fantastic, in-depth piece was written in 2009 for the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) by a designer who's worked for the park service for over four decades, so I'll quote right from it:

Although never intended as a primary expression of identity, architecture has long helped define the NPS style. Two relatively recent periods of intense construction account for the architectural forms associated with national (and state) parks. The first was the result of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression’s later years. The genre (sometimes called “parkitecture”) was similar to the rustic Adirondack style used in the East, but is characterized by the stone and rough-hewn timbers most often used in Western parks, or the adobe used in the Southwest. The work is largely the legacy of architect Herbert Maier, who worked as a consultant to the NPS during the 1920s and 30s and later as an employee. Despite an appeal that endures today, the rustic style of architecture was rapidly abandoned after World War II [emphasis added].

The look and feel of these lodges loom large enough in the public's imagination to have formed the basis for an award winning series on PBS, and two volumes of companion text. If you've visited even one of these lodges, you know what I'm talking about.

Lake McDonald Lodge

Constructed in 1913 and opened the following year, Lake McDonald Lodge is the smallest of the three sites I visited in Glacier and sits near the western entrance to the park.

The view of the rear facade from the lake.

The lodge was designed by noted Pacific Northwest architect Kirtland Cutter. Although he fashioned the exterior in a Swiss Chalet style (very similar to his Idaho Building for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair), the interior spaces—particularly the central lobby—echo the other National Parks Lodges with an emphasis on grandness, natural materials, and Native American crafts and artworks.

At first this felt somewhat incongruous to me, but then I realized that the exterior Swiss style is in excellent balance with the surrounding landscapes. And it's very intentional, as we'll see below; Glacier National Park was marketed by the railroad companies to the domestic travelling elite as "America's Alps" and "The Switzerland of North America," particularly by Louis W. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was a way for the well-to-do to 'visit Europe' without getting on an ocean liner for an extensive voyage.

From the top floor looking down into the central lobby.

The interior spaces is where the NPL "Parkitecture" DNA is truly expressed, in contrast to the European facades outside. From the lighting to the furnishings, floor carpets to antiques, it would be easy to imagine this lobby at any other NP in the West. You can find similar raw wood railings and natural tree limb staircases, tones and colors, even fabrics and leathers at El Tovar or the Ahwahnee Hotel.

Many Glacier Hotel

On the far eastern side of the park sits the Many Glacier Hotel. This is Swiss style of Lake McDonald done writ large, and in a far grander setting.

A panorama of the hotel complex, facing west.

As I mentioned above, Glacier was intentionally marketed to wealthy tourists as an alternative to making the long journey to Europe; this grand hotel and its surrounding environs make good on that pitch.

The Great Northern Railway built all of Glacier Park's hotels through a newly organized subsidiary, the Glacier Park Hotel Company. Louis W. Hill chose the Many Glacier valley for the largest of the hotels.

Lake McDonald Lodge and Many Glacier Hotel are not the only lodgings in the park executed in the Swiss Style. There is also Belton Chalet just outside the west entrance as well as the more remote Granite Park and Sperry chalets. Many, however, is simply the most grand.

The hotel was built a year after McDonald opened and for decades it was the single largest in Montana, having some 240 guest rooms in its wings. Many's overhanging roofs and balconies are painted a rich, deep brown, with white and gold trim. The traditional Swiss Cross of Helvetia—white on a red shield—is the hotel's coat of arms, and is used on signage throughout, as well as on the door of every guest room.

Germanic blackletter on interior signage.

As I've explored elsewhere, sometimes you get themes within themes, nested like Russian Matryoshka dolls, sometimes themes are blended together like a stew, and other times they sort of resemble Venn diagrams with only partial criteria overlapping. There is also this notion of volume knobs or mixer sliders; at certain times a theme is 'dialed up' and other times it is 'turned down' in relation to others in the medley. At Lake McDonald, the Swiss exterior and "Parkitecture" interiors are fairly in balance. Here at Many Glacier, the European elements are dominant, even on the inside.

Glacier Park Lodge

Despite its name, the third major site I visited is actually just outside the park's boundaries on the eastern side. Glacier Park Lodge is most closely tied to the NLP DNA, and does not retain any of the Swiss chalet elements present at the other sites.

The lodge was ostensibly designed by noted Midwestern architect Samuel L. Bartlett, but in actuality Louis W. Hill of the Great Northern Railway dominated the entire process. The man was obsessed with the hotels the company was now building in Glacier National Park, and he even stepped down as company president to oversee them. Glacier Park Lodge is very much in step with the Western grandeur of Yosemite's Old Faithful Inn. Three story log balconies, covered by broad hooded gables, are finished in dark paint with bare window trim under dark green roofs.

The playbook is consistent: a massive open lobby space adorned with raw timber columns and railings. Chandeliers done in a lantern style. Native American patterned carpets and upholstery. Framed landscape oils fill the hallways.

It's almost as if somewhere at National Park headquarters, there is a large, dusty three-ring binder holding all the key brand standards to these properties. There isn't, but it sure feels that way.

Some have gone even further. There are companies such as Pendleton Wools who have transformed (the more cynical might say, exploited) the design elements they provided to various lodges under exclusive contract into complete branded product lines years on. Which brings up the issue, where is the line drawn between theme and brand? Or, as architects and artists would say, between school, style, program, and movement?

Native American-inspired apolstry on the lobby's second level.

Along with Native American designs, the buffalo remains a constant motif in the park lodges of the West.

Couch pattern from seating in the Glacier Park Lodge lobby's main level.

The public certainly recognizes the U.S National Parks as a brand. And the parks present themselves—in terms of communication design—along the same lines of consistency as you would see in corporate identity work.

National Park / National Monument / National Forest signage from this trip.

Typefaces, colors, shapes, and materials are for the most part quite consistent across National Parks, Monuments, and Forests. Wayfinding and site markers might vary dude to age, certainly. Yet this is a much stronger visual identity than is presented to the public by other government organs—and extremely unique, too. There is no Red White & Blue, no Stars & Stripes, no "Big D.C." nationalist branding. It's friendly and instantly recognizable.

What happens when "Parkitecture" becomes thematic design?

Continued in Part 2.

Themerica Travel Resumed.

December 11, 2017 by Dave Gottwald

The Return

It's been a long road. Themerica is back. I'm Dave Gottwald. After seven years working in exhibit design and graphic design at the Oakland Museum of California, I took a full-time professorship at the University of Idaho in 2016. And in July of 2017, I began the first of what will be many travels continuing my documentation and analysis of thematic design. Themerica began in 2007 as my MFA design thesis project. Over the course of a year and a half, I traveled to many places; all eleven (at the time) Disney Parks around the world, Las Vegas, Macau, Dubai...

All those original musings and photograph are archived here, part of a larger section on my primary website about the project. Going forward, this new blog is where I'll be musing on thematic design and what myself and colleague Greg Turner-Rahman are calling the "End of Architecture." But first, on to this past summer's travels.

The route of our first leg through Wisconsin to Michigan. Map data: Ⓒ Google.

Summer 2017

It was simply by happenstance that myself and MFA candidate David Janssen, Jr. were both headed to the same place in July of 2017: Michigan. Rather than simply sharing the cost of gas and lodging, we thought this would be an awesome opportunity for collaboration between artist and designer, faculty and graduate student, mentor and protégé. David wanted to incorporate typography into his practice of painting and printmaking. Neither of us had any real experience setting type on press. The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin was on our route, so we enrolled in one of their all-day letterpress workshops.

Spreads from our book, 88MPH. — Spreads from our book, *88MPH*.

Typo-photography

During the drive eastward, we decided to document all the typography we saw through seven states, aiming our lenses at the letters that form the backbone of roadside America. Upon returning home, I designed a book of our photography, 88MPH, and David designed the cover. We then curated a selection of photos for inclusion in the 2017 University of Idaho Faculty Exhibition, which is on view at Moscow's Prichard Art Gallery through December 23.

88MPH is a reference to the magical speed one must attain in the fabled Delorean to travel through time in the Back to the Future films. And in a sense, surveying the letters of roadside America is indeed its own form of time travel. Here were sun-bleached characters on sides of buildings; stoic ghosts that keep watch over the empty Main Streets of towns across the Heartland. Here was scrawl in permanent marker, worn paint on wood, cracked vinyl on glass.

The setting sun as we cruised through Wyoming.

Coming Attractions

So that was part of the journey eastward this past summer. The first leg. After leaving Mr. Janssen in Saginaw, MI, I was looking forward to the second and third legs of my travels, which would bring me back home through the highways, byways, and backroads of Themerica.

In general, all the photography posted will be my own. Occasionally I might use a third party source for something I was unable to capture, and attribute it as such. But for the most part I'll stick with my rough and tumble, point-and-shoot snaps. I won't try to fancy up any of my posts with professional photography lifted from online. I'm not a photographer by any stretch, so think of these as amateur Kodachrome slides, projected in the living room to accompanying narration.

Between teaching and other university duties, I'm not sure how frequently I will be posting here, but I'm going to begin with a series which documents the entire five weeks during July and August 2017 I spent on the road studying thematic design. From Deadwood, South Dakota to Cedar Point, Ohio. From Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford, to Kansas City's Worlds of Fun. From Walt Disney's boyhood town (Marceline, Missouri) to Harper Goff's (Fort Collins, Colorado)—both of which inspired designs at Disneyland. From two presidential libraries, to local history museums.

Onward.