Architext: The Real Magic of Harry Potter World

In February, I went to Orlando. You wouldn't initially think that Central Park and Harry Potter World have much in common, but they’re actually both extremely well designed stage sets. Whereas Central Park is artificial nature, Harry Potter World is artificial fantasy. Olmsted “paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountainsides and ocean views” (quote from master planner of Chicago, Daniel Burnham) while the makers of Harry Potter World paint with streets, squares, building scale, and playful interactive facades. Orlando is a very strange land of 6 lane highways and immersive amusement park experiences. The absurdity of Americans is that instead of living in great urban spaces, Americans are content to live in the junk space of suburbia strip malls and super highways yet pay high prices and wait hours in line to enter amusement parks to experience the fantasy of great urban space rather than just live in great urban space.

I personally couldn’t make it past the first chapter of Harry Potter. I didn’t understand the hype surrounding the book... preferring to read non-fiction books like dishwasher instruction manuals and architecture books. In my attempts to watch the Potter movies, I probably slept through half of them, leaving me with a very disjointed understanding of the plot. I would wake up to a random scene like Harry Potter in an out of body experience with a fetus-looking horcrux, or a flying-bird-horse beast biting Malfoy, and think ‘this is so weird’ then doze back to sleep.

So I entered the Harry Potter wizarding world in Orlando like an outsider... kind of knowing some of the jargon and plot, but not really well enough to hold a meaningful conversation. Having never been to Disney World or Universal Studios, I was curious why post modernist architects like Charles Moore (https://archinect.com/news/article/147190864/you-still-have-to-pay-for-the-public-life) closely studied and wrote about amusement parks in their efforts to formulate a position against modernism. I found Walt Disney, who was not an architect, to be a naturally gifted urban planner and visionary. He understood human psychology and it fueled his animations and designs. What I found to be the real magic of Harry World, was its ability to methodically extract cash from visitors through planning, set design, and interactivity. In his books, Gehl writes that restauranteurs know best how to attract visitors… they know how crucial urban space is to their business. The design strategies Universal Studios executed with the planning and architecture of Harry Potter World is right out of Gehl’s playbook and has generated some serious cash flow: 1) use winding roads where new prospects are revealed at every turn, 2) keep cars off the street 3) provide squares for gathering, with different types of seating configurations to view people in action 4) expand the public areas with colonnades which offer shade and sheltered viewing of streets 5) design human scaled buildings and details with special attention to cornices, signs, materials 6) use interactive and engaging window displays (ingeniously triggered by a wave of a $52 wand). The former mayor of London Boris Johnson lamented that Harry Potter World had been commercialized outside JK Rowling’s home nation, but this is another example of how American ideas (business ingenuity) evolved from established English systems (free market systems ala Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations) to better execute the realization of a fantasy world. Moreso than the English, Americans have great imagination and are shameless when it comes to selling and marketing merchandise - from wizard robes, to wands, to stationary, to pictures, to stuffed animals, to quidditch broomsticks… at Harry Potter World visitors purchase all types of mementos they didn’t even know they needed.

In 2010, Hogsmeade was constructed and featured a novel robotic arm virtual reality Forbidden Journey roller coaster ride. The fiscal results for Hogsmeade was staggering. Universal, which now attracts an average of 22k visitors a day, was able to pay off their $170 million Harry Potter World construction costs within a half year of operation mostly on the sale of Butter Beer (a very sweet gross butterscotch liquid)! Shortly after the Hogsmeade’s success, Universal created Diagonalley. This has prompted Disney to invest $500 million in Avatar to compete for amusement market share. This “Attract new visitors or die” attitude is creating an immersive fantasy experience arms race between Universal Studios and Disney employing the most cutting edge urban planning and architecture innovations available. From Hogsmeade today, you can see new construction cranes looming in the distance making future rides to compete with the anticipated Star Wars opening at Disney later this month.

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