Commentary : You Call This Architecture? : There’s A Crying Need for New Thinking and Name for Latest Trend: Try Hokeytecture

C’mon, now, is this a joke? people are asking.

Are reputable architects serious when they design a corporate headquarters in Burbank with a roof supported by the Seven Dwarfs?

Are designers laughing up their sleeves when they create an instant, mock-European street, “Via Rodeo,” complete with cobblestones and fake-historical facades in the middle of Beverly Hills?

Has fakery become the latest architectural fad nationwide, and especially in Southern California? Is the laugh on us? And seriously, how do we evaluate--by the usual standards by which architecture is judged--whether buildings are good or bad?

“When image replaces substance, when design is reduced to decoration, architecture becomes a stage set,” says Arthur Golding, a USC architecture professor. “Only the image matters in the current marketing of retail shops, hotels and restaurants as theater. It has led from theme interiors to theme buildings and theme districts.”

But Golding has it wrong.

The mistake he makes is to apply the appellation architecture to such Seven Dwarfed-creations as Disney’s new Burbank building.

We need a new classification, a term that acknowledges the motivation and intention of such designs.

Call it hokey-tecture.

Hokey is used here, as defined by the Random House dictionary as “obviously contrived, especially to win popular appeal or support,” rather than in the derogatory sense of outright phoniness.

Hokeytecture--let’s drop the hyphen, too, shall we?--has its own criteria:

* Like Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, it always has a theme, an obvious visual narrative or “script” that dominates the design, overriding any purely formal aesthetic concept.

* The images it projects are always secondhand, drawn from movies or television or mass-media memories of a nostalgically better or more graceful past.

* Not only are its images secondhand, they are never transformed by the designer’s imagination--unlike populist imageries freshly reimagined by serious architects such as Frank Gehry, or the often ironic use of historic references in the Post Modern style.

* Its construction materials are often cheap imitations of classier finishes it can’t or won’t afford.

* It is never ironic, seldom means to be serious and displays its essential hokery upfront.

Some of these criteria are graphically explained by Disney chairman Michael Eisner, the Lorenzo de Medici of hokeytecture, who having commissioned some of the world’s best architects for hokeytecture unrivaled anywhere, is well qualified to explain the style’s intentions.

“It’s all an illusion,” he said in a recent interview published in Metropolitan Home magazine. “My ethic--and I learned this in the movie business--is that . . . if you’re on a Disney ride, and the car stops moving, and the lights come on, you see the seams.”

Eisner admits that his magic is not seamless: “You use wood where people can really see it. Where they can’t, you use something that looks like wood, but costs less. Michael Graves’ hotels at Disney World (in Orlando, Fla.) are done with paint.”

Graves, a Princeton-based architect, designed Disney World’s themed Swan and Dolphin hotels, topping each with outsize fiberglass figures of the animals after which they are named. He also designed the Seven Dwarfs building in Burbank.

Eisner has had no trouble recruiting major talents such as Graves, Frank Gehry, Robert Stern, Antoine Predock, Arata Isozaki and others to his hokeytecture fold.

“Yesterday, every architect in America dreamed of building office towers for enlightened developers,” said New York design critic Suzanne Stephens. “Today they want to work for Michael Eisner.”

His only problem, Eisner said, is that these architects “say yes to me too much. I keep trying to get them to tell me when I’m wrong, when I’m stupid.”

Graves claimed that working for Eisner has “made me more lighthearted, less pompous. The Disney projects are a lot of fun, and architecture needs fun if it isn’t to get too portentous.”

But some Disney designers have more trouble adapting to the hokeytecture mode.

Predock, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based designer who has created a Santa Fe-style motel complete with a phony drive-in for Eisner’s giant Euro Disney project outside Paris, said that working for Disney is “a kind of guerrilla theater. You make hit-and-run forays into the arena to defend architecture, and retreat with commands that can crush you.”

This comment reveals that Predock is making Prof. Golding’s error of classification in applying architecture’s criteria to hokeytecture.

No such confusion, however, troubles New York architect Robert Stern. Acclaimed by Eisner as “almost an Imagineer” (a member of the Disney in-house design team that creates the theme park extravaganzas), Stern said in a 1989 symposium at UC Irvine that “hokeyness is OK, so long as it says what it is.”

Does all this mean that good architects have sold out? That, in Prof. Golding’s complaint, designers have “abandoned the public realm to scenography?”

No. Architect Charles Moore, one of the subtlest minds on the current design scene, has a clear take on the uses of hokeytecture in contemporary culture.

“Walt Disney gave us the Theme Park, the multilayered parfait of civic realities . . .” he wrote in his book, “The City Observed: Los Angeles.”

“He replaced the downtowns, civic amenities, public parks . . . with a made-up, hoked-up, highly energized and extremely attractive Magic Kingdom . . . and it does not stretch credulity very far to see Southern California’s rather ephemeral public realm as a concentration of Theme Parks,” Moore wrote.

In fact, theme or “programmatic” architecture has a long history in Los Angeles. The city boasts, among other delights:

* A Coca-Cola bottling plant modeled after an ocean liner.

* A former tire factory designed to look like an Assyrian fortress.

* An airport restaurant resembling a sci-fi spider.

* And a hot dog stand shaped like an outsize frankfurter in a bun.

Moore--who, oddly enough, has not yet been called upon by Eisner--captures the essence of Disneyland’s Main Street, and the impulse behind all hokeytecture, when he says that, “in the manner of a family album of smiling snapshots, Main Street recalls a cheerful and altogether cleaned-up past, one that is eternally freshly painted, blooming, tidy and sunny.”

In the society of strangers that cities such as Los Angeles have become, where a sense of community is disturbingly tenuous, the only shared images are the ones from the “family album of smiling snapshots” offered by movies and TV--and skillfully recreated by popular theme parks.

The huge, new residential and commercial development planned for Playa Vista beside Marina del Rey, for example, is derived from a hokeytectural notion of pre-World War II small-town American life. Based on the ideas of Miami-based architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who built the Gulf Coast resort town of Seaside (complete with white picket fences, sloping tin roofs and clapboard siding), Playa Vista hopes to conjure a lost sense of community.

“What the American city needs is to encode for different social environments,” Duany said. Streets and buildings must be “derived from existing types we have seen work, types which are generic” to popular memory of a suburban serenity more imagined than actual.

Playa Vista’s designers understand that Americans live in “Happy Days,” share the comforts of “The Cosby Show,” inhabit the upscale Angst of “thirtysomething” and delight in the degeneracies of “Dallas.”

This is the crux of the matter.

Hokeytecture imagery is our community. And that is its attraction and power.

So long as we understand its intentions, and refrain from confusing it with formal architecture, it has a valid place in the urban scenario.

And it can be fun.