AMUSEMENT PARK

Amusement parks are controlled environments that entertain visitors through the
simulation of space, place, and experience. It is the element of control that is initially
most important in defining the building type because the amusement park presents itself
as a safe, and indeed sanitized, environment wherein conventionally dangerous or
arduous activities can be undertaken without fear of their consequences. The desire for
control leads to the necessity of simulating or fictionalizing each and every space and
event that the visitor to the park will experience. For this reason, amusement park
designers often treat their buildings and settings simply as film sets, facades that are
divorced from the function of their interiors and that are dismantled and changed at will.
In the early years of the 20th century, this transience was exacerbated by the fact that a
single designer was rarely responsible for more than one part of any park. In
combination, these factors render the task of determining who has designed the park, and
even its date of completion, difficult. This situation has changed in recent years, with
many respected architects, including Michael Graves, Robert Stern, Antoine Predock,
Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown, accepting commissions for the
design of amusement parks and associated facilities (hotels and training centers). Major
20th-century amusement parks include Disneyland (1955) in Anaheim, Florida; Six Flags
over Texas (1961) near Fort Worth, Texas; Walt Disney World (1965) in Orlando,
Florida; Universal Studios (1970–80) in Los Angeles, California; Tokyo Disneyland
(1983) in Tokyo; and Fox Studios (1996–99) in Sydney.
One particular type of amusement park, the theme park, also rose to prominence in the
last half of the 20th century. The theme park is characterized by a limited set of welldefined
thematic boundaries. Typical theme parks include the Old Westflavored Knotts
Berry Farm (1940, 1970) in Anaheim, California; the theologically focused Bible World
(1975) in Orlando, Florida; the evolutionary-themed Darwin Centre (1995) in Edinburgh;
and the piratical Mundomar (1996) by Estudio Nombela on Spain’s Costa Blanca.
Despite these differences, the terms “theme park” and “amusement park” are often used
interchangeably to refer to any space that promotes enjoyment through simulation.
The origins of the amusement park are frequently traced to the 17th-century pleasure
gardens of England and France. One of the most famous of these parks was Vauxhall
Gardens in London, which first opened in 1661 and by 1728 contained mechanical rides,
parachute jumps, and balloon ascensions. Perhaps the most popular of these early
amusement parks was the Prater in Vienna, which became the site of the 1873 Vienna
World’s Fair and which featured both a primitive wooden Ferris wheel and one of the
first large carousels. However, although amusement parks first came to prominence in
Europe, it was in North America that they enjoyed their greatest success. One of the first
large American amusement parks was Jones’s Wood, which opened in New York in the
early years of the 19th century. Jones’s Wood comprised a loose collection of beer halls,
music houses, viewing platforms, dioramas, and shooting galleries. Rapid development of the
surrounding areas forced Jones’s Wood to close in the late 1860s just as a new era in
amusement park design was beginning on nearby Coney Island.
In 1897 George Tilyou erected a walled enclosure around his Steeplechase ride on
Coney Island. This act of enclosing the site and controlling entry to his rides is regarded
as a defining moment in 20th-century amusement park design. Of similar significance is
Tilyou’s claim that if “Paris is France, Coney Island, between June and September, is the
World” (McCullough, 1957, 291). With this statement, Tilyou set in motion the 20thcentury
amusement park obsession with spatial and cultural simulation. Tilyou believed
that by constructing replicas of famous building types from different parts of the world,
he could simulate the entire planet in such a way that it could be quickly, efficiently, and
safely experienced by large numbers of paying customers. Such was the success of
Steeplechase Park (1897) that two new Coney Island amusement parks, Luna Park (1903)
and Dreamland (1904), soon followed. Luna Park simulated a trip to the moon, and
Dreamland featured a number of attractions, including a partial reconstruction of Pompeii
(complete with simulated eruptions on the hour) and a six-story building where customers
could experience an office fire firsthand. Such was the success of this building type that
by 1919 there were more than 1,500 amusement parks in North America, although the
Depression saw this figure drop to barely 200 financially viable parks in the 1940s. It was
not until the 1950s that Walt Disney revitalized the industry with his themed zones
(Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland) and his focus on the
traditional values of middle America. The success of Disneyland at Anaheim saw a string
of similar Disney parks opened around the world, including EPCOT (1982) in Florida
and the more controversial EuroDisney (1992) near Paris. This friction between the
“real” and the “simulated” or “virtual” is evident in many recent amusement park
designs. At one extreme, amusement parks are increasingly producing more complex and
realistic electronic simulations. Virtual World (1981–92) in San Diego, California;
Acurinto (1996) in Nagasaki; and SegaWorld (1996–98) in Sydney each feature
extensive electronic, or video game, environments. In sharp contrast to this trend is the
rise in amusement parks that promote ecotourism as a “real” experience. Mitsuru Man
Senda’s Asahikawa Shunkodai Park (1994) and his Urawa Living Museum (1995) in
Urawa are examples of parks that advocate a “genuine” appreciation of the environment
or history of the “real world.” Ironically, in many respects each of these extremes is as
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 92
artificial as the other. The only difference is that in one environment the simulation is
glorified, whereas in the other it is repressed or hidden.

AMSTERDAM SCHOOL

The Amsterdam School was comprised of Dutch architects active between 1910 and 1930
whose work was associated with Expressionism and promulgated by the publication Wendingen.
During World War I and for a decade thereafter, the striking and controversial work of
the Amsterdam School transformed entire portions of its eponymous city and influenced
architecture throughout the Netherlands. Although almost every building type was
addressed, the major monuments are governmentfunded ensembles of workers’ dwellings
arranged in perimeter blocks that brought a new scale to Dutch cities. Paradoxically,
although its members sought unique solutions for each commission, a readily identifiable
group style emerged, and collaborations were frequent. Characterized by a luxurious
fantasy and individualistic details, the work came under fire in the later 1920s from
proponents of the functionalist Nieuwe Bouwen; subsequently, the Amsterdam School was written out of
the literature. But in the 1970s, reevaluation commenced; many of the buildings have
been restored and once again are a magnet for architects and urbanists.
The cradle of the Amsterdam School was the atelier of Eduard Cuypers (1859–1927).
Working there at various times during the first decade were its future leader, Michel de
Klerk (1884–1923) and such important representatives as Johann Melchior van der Mey
(1878–1949) and Pieter Lodewjik Kramer (1881–1961). Other future acolytes in that
office who absorbed Cuypers’s credo that architecture was first and foremost an art that
must transcend, while serving the pragmatic realities of program and resources, included
G.F.LaCroix (1877–1923), Nicolaas Landsdorp (1885–1968), B.T.Boeyinga (1886–
1969), Jan Boterenbrood (1886–1932), J.M.Luthmann (1890–1973), and Dick Greiner
(1891–1964).
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 88
Cuyper’s peculiar synthesis of Austrian and German Jugendstil (Art Nouveau), British
Arts and Crafts, Belgian Art Nouveau, 17th-century Dutch architecture, and Indonesian
art appears in more abstract guise in all of their work. Better known architects of
Cuypers’s generation such as Willem Kromhout (1864–1940) and K.P.C.de Bazel (1869–
1923) also were admired exemplars but with the doyen of Dutch architecture,
H.P.Berlage (1856–1934), they had a more complicated relationship. In his one published
statement of 1916, de Klerk criticized Berlage’s work for its excessive sobriety and lack
of representational character in both materials and function. Yet they followed his use of
geometric systems to proportion plans and elevations, and in the late teens and early
1920s, Berlage worked with members of the Amsterdam School and responded to their
delight in piquant invention; his housing around the Mercatorplein (1925–27) indicates a
mutual regard.
Although the Amsterdam School, unlike its rival, De Stijl, embraced no specific
theoretical program, its members were united not only by stylistic practice and the
conviction that architecture was first and foremost an inclusive art that should be
aesthetically accessible to people of all classes, but also by training (many were
autodidacts or studied in courses outside the main professional school at Delft). To
understand the movement’s rapid and widespread—if short-lived—influence, it is
necessary to review several peculiarly Dutch institutions through which its “members”
exercised power. The club Architectura et Amicitia (A et A), founded in 1855, during the
teens and twenties was led by those sympathetic to the artistic ideals of the Amsterdam
School, whose work was privileged in its publications, especially Wendi ngen (literally, “Turnings,”
but in the sense of departures or deviations), which under the partisan edi-torship of
Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld (1885–1987) appeared monthly from 1918 to 1928. The
club also held competitions and exhibitions that disseminated designs conforming to the
group’s aesthetic position; it was in a review of the display mounted by A et A in 1916
that the name Ams terdams e School first appeared in print.
Amsterdam’s municipal organizations also played a role. The Department of Public
Works was staffed by its adherents, as testified by the street furniture, bridges, public
baths, schools, and offices for city agencies that were designed and executed between
1917 and 1930. The Social Democrats responsible for housing policy in Amsterdam were
admirers, for they believed that the work of the Amsterdam School dignified the
neighborhoods of the working- and lower-middle-class families for whom they were
responsible. The Commission of Aesthetic Advice (Schoonhei ds commis s ie), which passed judgment on exterior
design, also was dominated by its advocates, much to the chagrin of architects of other
stylistic persuasions, who often had to change their designs to conform to Amsterdam
School conceptions.
Multicolored brick and tile, quintessentially Dutch materials, were employed for
structure and cladding but used in unprecedented ways, in combination with concrete,
stone, and powerful new mortars, to create unique configurations that pulsate with
vitality. The dynamism of the modern metropolis inspired many of the formal strategies
employed by the Amsterdam School, yet vernacular, historical, and even naturalistic
references, as well as motifs from German and Scandinavian architecture and Frank
Lloyd Wright, leavened the imagery. This was a narrative architecture that used massing
and ornament iconographically, to contextualize each commission. Accusations of
irrationalism and facadism were exaggerated; when commissions allowed, interior spaces
Entries A–F 89
were as ingenious as exterior envelopes and in each case expressed the realities of the
program. After 1925 socioeconomic events curtailed the extravagant conceits of the
Amsterdam School and led to a more repetitious and less imaginative vocabulary, but
during its reign in the Netherlands it was responsible for such remarkable buildings as the
Scheepvaarthuis, 1912–16 (by Van der Meij, Kramer, and de Klerk), and the housing
estates Eigen Haard, 1914–18 (de Klerk) and De Dageraad, 1919–21 (de Klerk and
Kramer), all in Amsterdam, plus the villas compromising Park Meerwijk, 1917, in
Bergen (Kramer, La Croix, plus J.F Staal [1879–1940] and Margaret StaalKropholler
[1891–1966], the Netherlands’ first female architect), the Bijenkorf Department Store in
The Hague, 1925–26, by Kramer, and the post office in Utrecht 1917–24, by Joseph
Crouwel (1885–1962).