Where Dreams Come Through

When I visited New York City as a child, the skyscrapers and towers that I’d seen watching The Jetsons on TV in Mexico materialized for the first time before me. Years later, visiting New York City again, I began to imagine what my future vocation might be.

Whether vocation is a call from a divine source as in the Spanish-speaking world or an instinct that “the shoe will fit” in English parlance, I am struck by the importance that vocation played at a time when I felt otherwise clueless about my future. It is not that I was predestined to attend architecture school but that the influence of cities, friends, magazines, books, and movies nurtured my early call and gave me the tenacity to make my vocation a reality and see my imagined future come true.

Much of what architects learn through project challenges comes in the form of variety: variety in the client’s vision, variety in the dynamics of the market sectors, variety in the project components, variety in the country, the city, the site, the people, the team, the consultants, the schedule, the cost of materials, and, most of all, the challenge of a new design. The excitement comes from knowing that although construction systems have been standardized by our country’s consumer model, there are still opportunities to think through an architectural problem.

Architects are always solving problems. We are committed to the idea of getting up every day to go into the office to solve new problems, challenges, and design puzzles. It’s discoveries that feed a profession — not the income reward, but the persistence and time invested in incessant challenges, each unique in its context.

In a down market, when the pace of commercial real estate declines gradually — or precipitously — architects have no option but to diversify and explore new ideas and opportunities. Recessions are a time to invent projects, invent clients, and maintain a resourceful attitude.

In those days at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Los Angeles, the down-market steamroller crushed many of our projects. Pretty soon there were fewer opportunities for new commercial or private investment projects. We explored unconventional ideas, like working with the Los Angeles Times to modernize the design of its dilapidated 1930s art deco building. That kept us busy, but the effort never led to construction. We also tried some design work in Russia that went nowhere. Those were challenging times for high design in a well-regarded office full of young architects.

What really helped get us out of the funk was an incredible opportunity. SOM could not be called a modest firm. The opportunity to work with outside designers had not been tried by the Los Angeles office, and the idea intrigued the technical partner at the time. For us, this opportunity came from none other than the Imagineering group of the Walt Disney Co. To work with the creative force behind the Disney Real Estate Parks was a chance I relished. Still, nothing had prepared me for the collaboration that was the Mickey’s Toontown project.

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It began with a story, narrated by Creative, the obstinate yet incredibly resourceful group of writers and storytellers at Disney. They took the story and began to collaborate with their illustrator counterparts. The ideas were compiled into a storybook that would serve to generate the big ideas.

When Imagineering came to SOM for consultation on possibly creating a real cartoon land for the characters in Mickey Mouse’s world to inhabit — a small village of structures to be added to Disneyland in Anaheim, California — the mandate was to avoid the old themed versions of buildings previously attempted in Florida’s Magic Kingdom. Imagineering wanted a small town where the entirety of the environment was the hidden world of Mickey.

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As architects, we realized, in ‘architectonic’ sketching, the graphic and artistic yet stylized and conceptual world they wanted to create in three dimensions. At my SOM office, years before this project arrived, we had been producing partial construction documentation with a drafting software that, coupled with powerful computers (using RISC architecture software running on UNIX-enabled processors), was a true precursor of BIM. With all its troubles, AES Model was the first CAD system with a fully three-dimensional enabling software. SOM developed it in collaboration with IBM in the 1980s.

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The Disney Imagineers’ concept intrigued our designers, but CAD was still in its early stages and not effective for handling the research of the construction technologies, collaboration in a 3D format, and the production of a project that required intense management and close collaboration with the Imagineers. The Disney Creative group was more comfortable carving Styrofoam physical models than embedding themselves into the modeling of 3D solid imagery.

Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, computer graphics had begun to be used in film and television, but architecture BIM wouldn’t be available until many years later. It’s interesting to think that what held us back as a profession in the digital world was scale. The quantity of instructions required to run graphics software could not be compacted so that it could operate easily on personal computers in an architecture office until the turn of the 21st century.

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In Burbank, the Imagineers were building a half-inch-scale, very detailed carved-foam physical model of Mickey’s Toontown in their big warehouse. For us, one of the main obstacles to replicating the Imagineers’ work was that the computer model tried to simplify or standardize ideas that required fidelity in form, texture, and color. As with many projects created by large firms at the beginning of the CAD era, only plans and elevations were fully developed using the computer as a coordination tool. The remainder of the design documents and eventually the construction documents were hand-drawn. For Mickey’s Toontown, the elevations (the images), sections and details were of utmost importance in maintaining the creative forms.

It was a truly delightful exercise to draft and research with the aim of discovering the methodology of the construction systems to be used on this project by the labor pool at the time. It proved to be one of the most valuable processes we’ve lost since the advent of the computer as a design development tool: the ability to think through a design concept in three-dimensional form, by way of iteratively drawing the forms and discovering, while drawing, the different views and sectional relationships. By this process, we gain the understanding necessary to optimize appropriate materials and systems. This was the craft. Today, design teams are challenged to develop concepts outside of BIM and then input their components into BIM in an almost standardized fashion — an objectively less creative approach, too often curtailing our design imagination.

It took, as I remember, perhaps a year for Creative to go through the process of arriving at the “story” and, along with it, the sketches of the environment: the Meet Mickey facility, Mickey’s House (the primary structure), Minnie’s House, Goofy’s Tower House, Pluto’s Dog House, Goofy’s Gas, and Chip ‘n Dale’s tree. It took judicial use of the AES model to nestle the three-dimensional forms to adapt/reuse an old Dutch roller coaster among the town structures.

Aside from being the project architect for Mickey’s Toontown — making me the coolest dad in my kids’ world — spending a year going to Disneyland every day gave me my first opportunity to be on a site with almost every type of construction on display in a single, small area. I simultaneously saw concrete in footings and walls, structural steel in complex forms, wood framing in creative shapes, heavy timber, and an abundance of rich exterior cement plaster applied to a reinforced cage of steel rebar or steel mesh. And of course there was rockwork, the now familiar industry created by this type of project, in which stonework imitates the irregularity of natural rock. Rockwork became the primary material used to construct and create the credible impression of a mountain on top of a three-story steel building.

Toontown brought endless opportunities; I researched Class A material roofing systems that could contain a self-healing waterproofing membrane, with an outer shell that conveyed the Imagineers’ concept of thick, uneven wood shakes, in multiple colorations. The Meet Mickey facility required close attention to security, for the sake of Disney’s make-believe effect — such as making certain that no one would ever see two Mickeys at the same time. It is understood that behind the scenes, for the purpose of the large enterprise of Disneyland, multiple Mickeys are shaking children’s hands throughout the park all day long. We discovered a flaw in our approach in the shop drawing process, finding that one secure route through the back-of-house areas of the Meet Mickey facility had only a 7-foot-6 clear headroom beam in a long stair.

It was a lucky catch. Somehow no one on the design team realized that when Mickey dons his impressive head/ears, the life-size character needs more than an 8-foot headroom clearance to safely navigate this secret route.

In every complex project that I have worked on, the obvious has been missed at one point or another. This is part of the variety I mentioned. There are countless things to watch for. Architecture is a profession where a team, and the eyes of everyone on that team, is essential. Sometimes only one member will catch such an important detail and make it known in time.

By far the most design effort was spent figuring out how to build the organic geometry of the walls, which bulged like cartoon images. Should the walls be built of wood studs? Was CFMF a better system? Could you brace ballooned out truss-like 2X framing with enough practicality to meet Zone IV seismic requirements? How do you document such complexity, considering the less-than-flexible wood framing construction crews of the day?

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Understanding these construction systems and their integration into the design process appealed to me. Becoming comfortable with the more technical endeavors of a project, witnessing how my research modified and optimized the design concepts and solutions of materiality and technology, manifested in personal professional growth.

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Some of the drawings developed for the Mickey’s House structure, Goofy’s Tower and others seemed like real art in the making. They required ingenuity and the effective use of technology, coupled with artistry and drawing skill. It made architecture fun.

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Looking back and trying to imagine that now with Rhino, Grasshopper, and other algorithmic design modeling software, I fear some might think that our past efforts were a waste of time. I say that the lack of technology back then forced ingenuity and added invaluable best-approach techniques to the problem-solving process of architecture, design and construction technology. It necessitated strategies for lean design before that term existed. With the excessive use of design technology today, much of this craft is being lost in contemporary architecture school programs. That’s to the detriment of the important process of discovery through hand-drafting design and the development of unique technical solutions in everyday project work.

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Little did I imagine, when I followed the calling of technical architecture, that I would discover such satisfaction in the vagaries of design images, the immense possibilities beyond design, the fresh thinking every day, the joy of getting to know other people through the long process of project work, the opportunity to meet other cultures through design, the fortune of being of service in whatever area of work a practitioner chooses within the variegated field of architecture.

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Seeing your efforts and your thoughts reflected in the most peculiar corner of a building, on projects as far afield as Mickey’s Toontown in Anaheim, or a skyscraper in Bangkok or Manila, or a transit center in San Francisco — for this and for the many other incredible experiences, I am grateful to have heeded that voice of my vocation so early in my youth. If not by divine intervention, then by force of nature, vocation is a powerful guide. It can take years to see, but it is never too late to discover that this great challenge you’ve undertaken as your life pursuit is indeed your vocation.

 

Erick del Angel, AIA is technical director at Gensler.