Moriana, Gleaming Bright / Moriana, Gloomy Night

WELCOME TO MORIANA

POPULATION: HALF WHAT YOU THINK

Fig. 1 Mark fondly ponders creation

Fig. 2 Moriana under construction

“When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers. [...]”

What is Disneyland, or Disney World, to a kid? Consider Disneyland’s dedication, by Walt Disney, in July of 1955:

To all who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America, with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.

Age relives fond memories of the past. Youth savors the challenge and promise of the future. The park is dedicated to the reconstruction of the world surrounding it. But that’s not quite correct! It is dedicated to life, but only the highlights. Age doesn’t relive the death of its father. Youth doesn’t savor the hardships of the future. The park is perfection crystallized, life idealized, the world as we wish it to be. Beauty, without the ugly mar of what holds it up.

Fig. 3 Moriana's seedy underbelly

“[...] If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk in a semicircle and you will come into view of Moriana’s hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sackcloth, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, blind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.”

But how can the Disney parks physically prop up such beauty? Surely if we had the technology to make life as we wish it, we wouldn’t reserve it for these two pockets of the world. The truth is, everything in the park is manufactured. It is a trick of the perspective, a deception of the eye, a falsification of the world it supposedly recreates. It is a simulacrum, a superficial imitation. There is no real, identifiable place it represents, and yet it represents… the world, somehow. Nothing in it is real. Consider Phillip K. Dick’s fantasies of altering it in “How to Build a Universe” (quoted, Liminality in Fantastic Fiction: A Poststructuralist Approach, Sandor Klapcsik):

In my writing, I got so interest in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces.

Disneyland is completely constructed; Main Street, USA is perfectly designed so that, from street level, one doesn’t realize that there is no difference between buildings from facade to facade, and all the facades do is hide the massive conglomerate beyond. Real birds poop and fly in peoples faces. Real hippos need to be cared for. Real lions eat other real animals. These are not ideal. These are not the world we want to see. These are not what we thought we wished for.

Fig. 4 Moriana in demolition

“From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.”

What does a California theme park have any to do with Calvino’s 1972 Invisible Cities? Consider these last few lines of the story of Moriana in the context of, in particular, Main Street, USA. “From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images.” From street level, you can see only the facades of buildings, that seem to stretch on for ages and ages. “But instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.” Disneyland exists as the union of two worlds: the world of the guests and patrons of the park who stroll through, and the world of the imagineers and employees who make the park run. As a guest, you’ll never see the underground tunnels that connect everything but for extreme emergency; you’ll never see the room where Mickey gets to take off his head. And as an employee, your diversions into the world of the guests are brief and fleeting; and when in your own world, you are completely divested. And yet, neither could still stand without the other. Disneyland is, in a sense, just like Moriana.

Fig. 5 Close-up of a glass house

So, how does one depict Moriana? Knowing this about Disneyland gave us a powerful guide already in place. We needed to depict two worlds: the world of the front of the city, beautiful and gleaming; and the world of the back of the city, where its true nature, hollow and put upon, is revealed. A billboard skyline, constructed of graham crackers held up with pretzel rods, form the facade of the city, hiding its back. Mountains and grassy land frame the city, the stage upon which we tell the story of this life. Downstage, there are beautiful glass (jolly rancher) houses and pediments and everything else, while upstage we transition from glass and transparency to graham cracker and opaquity. By giving some measure of transparency up front, we further hid the fact that there was anything to hide. Behind the graham crackers, was death and sadness and gnashing of teeth. There were the supports of the city, and the things it did not let become obvious. What actually held up the city as opposed to what the city aspired to be.

Fig. 6 Moriana being eaten

It's a warm April day and the sun is gleaming off of the icy blue water. You have just gotten off the ferry boat taking you to Moriana. You have never seen this city before, only in pictures from the travel brochures. The scene in front of you is almost surreal. You pass by the meadow and look up to the mountains in the distance, perfectly framing the colorful skyline peeking out above the nearly cloudless sky. As you approach the city, you walk up to the beautiful spiral columns inviting you in. The homes you see are fantastically colorful, yet translucent. You wonder if they are even sturdy enough to live in, or if they are simply for show. Either way, they are unlike anything you have ever witnessed. You wander down a road, to come to more buildings, somewhat translucent, somewhat more solid. Finally, you reach the skyline, as tall and colorful as can be. You try and enter, but the doors are stuck in place. Your curious spirit leads you to go investigate. You head back out of the spiral archway, through the meadow, and find a small tunnel leading you through the mountain pass. You come to find the back of the city, and you cannot believe your eyes. It can't be so. The once beautiful scene has turned decrepit and run-down. The buildings are more like broken shards and there is dirt and soot up to your knees. The magnificent skyline is being held up by splintered rods. The beautiful city you had always dreamed of visiting is merely a facade.

To demonstrate Moriana to the class, we led them to eat the city from front to back. Although there proved to be altogether too much food, the intention was that, as they worked their way backwards, they came to see more and more of the supports and hidden face, until they busted past the graham cracker skyline and revealed it in its entirety. The action of eating was the revelation of the story as it was encoded in the cake itself, alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight to the front hiding an expanse of rusting sheet metal and more to the back. A simulacrum of a perfect life in the city laid bare.

Fig. 7 Moriana's foundation, after day 1 of construction

Reflection 

We built our edible (and very delicious) rendition of the city of Moriana out of chocolate cake, frosting, melted chocolate, ice cream cones, coconut shavings, pretzels, jolly ranchers, wafers, graham crackers, dots candy, rope candy, pirouette cookies, sprinkles, icing, and animal crackers. The city’s base was a two tiered cake, surrounded by ice cream cone mountains and a gatorade river (not pictured). Just like the city described in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, our semicircular city had mountains, a river, spiral columns, a serpentine pediment, and “glass” houses. According to Calvino, “it consists of only a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper.” We depicted this by creating a skyline facade of 2-dimensional buildings. From a far away perspective, you cannot tell that the city does not continue on. The back of the facade portrays the “hidden face” of Moriana, consisting of rotting beams, ropes, soot, and spikes. To portray this unique aspect of the city, we imagined with guided imagery that we had never seen a city with an obverse like Moriana, and it was our first time discovering this truth.

Overall, this project was a great way to get to know our classmates, as well as to understand the book and the concepts behind creating and modeling our own built environments. It was fun to put our own creative spin on someone else’s imagined city. It was also enjoyable to bake and eat! Not only does architecture, or architecture modeled from sweets, have to come together to make a form that makes sense, but it also has to have a story or purpose, and we feel as though this class has really emphasized that. We also learned the value of giving and taking criticism, because all feedback helps challenge us to create the best projects we can through an iterative process.