tightgrip:

mills:

Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow: EPCOT.

“We’re convinced we must start with the public need…and the need is for starting from scratch and building a special kind of new community…that will always be in a state of becoming.”

-Walt Disney

The above video, from Optimisto, is sublime. In it, Walt Disney discusses the philosophy and implementation of EPCOT, a historically-typical mixture of idealism, capitalism, and a kind of benign (perhaps because unrealized) fascism.

What is more beautiful than these modernist dreams of the coming techno-utopia? The sweetly articulated vision of a perfect, enclosed, climate-controlled, utterly planned community is like a combination of Albert Speer and Sim City.  I find it extraordinarily moving in its misdirected ambitions: communal and capitalistic, dictatorial and implausible.

If you’re into modernism, you should see this; it’s all there: the obsession with symmetry, the faith in calculation and authority. As the narrator intones, EPCOT will show the world “…what American communities can accomplish through proper control of planning and design.”

Brilliant.