From fairy-tale castles to extraordinary buildings designed by the world's most distinguished architects, The Walt Disney Company has created exciting and influential architecture. The result, beautiful illustrated in this book is "architecture with a plot", a new approach to designing buildings. Disney is not just for kids. Over the past 10 years, the Walt Disney Company's chief executive, Michael Eisner, has commissioned some of the most renowned contemporary architects--Robert Venturi, Robert A. M. Stern, Arata Isozaki, Frank Gehry, Aldo Rossi, and Michael Graves among them--to design important buildings for the company. In the process, Disney has set new standards for postmodern architecture and has become one of its leading patrons anywhere in the world. The resulting projects, which include quirky, fantastic theme parks, hotels, resorts, movie studios, and offices, are evidence of how Disney's long-standing use of popular, often surreal, imagery and iconography has been absorbed into the architects' styles. This stunning volume offers original architectural drawings and superb color photographs of the projects alongside an expertly written text that incorporates extensive interviews with the architects and executives involved. Dunlop's (Aquitectonica, A.I.A., 1991) loving look at the constructed world of Disney begins with an elegant foreword by noted architectural professor and critic Vincent Scully. In the main survey, Dunlop brings fresh eyes and an infectious enthusiasm for the quality of the buildings and designs that make up the original Disneyland, Disney World, and EuroDisney. The visuals and text work very well together as Dunlop unites Disney's objectives for its buildings with the imagination of its architects in carrying out those goals. One frustration is the choice to use period black-and-white images of varying quality to depict much of Disneyland in Anaheim while the Orlando and Paris parks are presented in lush and perfect color. This book is a serious and orderly (but never somber) look at the architecture of whimsy and the often cockeyed world of cartoons brought to three-dimensional life. Recommended for all collections.?David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., Ct. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Used Book in Good Condition