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. 

arrival

interactive retail

endless merch

interactive plaza

urban space optimized for wealth extraction

niche statue

My Personal Brunelleschi

After the success of Central Park, Olmsted was invited to design landscapes in many cities in North America. In Boston, he created a series of parks around Boston called the Emerald Necklace. They stretch from the Charles river, to the Fens, to Jamaica Pond further inland. The jewel of the Emerald Necklace is the Esplanade, a 3 mile long stretch of narrow parallel spits of land offset from the shore with shady lagoons, lined with playgrounds and docks. The Community Boathouse is nestled behind the Hatch Shell performance area along the shore providing cheap summer sailing instruction to residents. One summer after college graduation, I decided to learn how  to sail after work. It was a new experience and a great way to decompress. 

I couldn’t find a job in architecture because no one would hire someone without experience... so I set about making a portfolio showing my facility in translating ideas from drawings to different media hoping a school would give me an opportunity.  I turned sketches into etchings, drawings into wax models into casts into bronze sculptures, and drawings into paintings and glass collages. My delusional hope was I could show enough potential that they could imagine I could turn a drawing into a building. I spent a couple years in manufacturing to learn computer drafting by taking a job at a power supply company. I ended up looking in depth at production processes to try to improve assembly times and quality. These power supplies were being used all over the world by companies like Cisco, Nortel, etc... the internet was booming and there was a demand for infrastructure. I didn’t know much about electrical engineering, but I did know some of the thin copper stamped coil inductors were failing because their solder joints were cracking in the field under extreme conditions. I wondered if it was possible to make a coil without joints by folding a stamped piece of copper like origami so the path of electrons could move helically around the magnetic core. An idea led to a crude paper origami model, which led to a copper prototype, thorough electrical and thermal testing, and finally the machines to manufacture them. I ended up designing the inductive transformers and the tooling and presses to make them, and eventually the assembly lines in Mexico to mass produce these components which are probably now scattered all over the world. I put this work into my architecture portfolio and I received a patent for it at the same time. An admissions officer remarked to me in an interview, my inductor looked like a building on the paths of the PC board. It was an exciting time of crazy hours and concentrated work. When you receive a patent in America, you get a paperback book with the legal claims delineated inside. On the front cover is some fancy calligraphy and a red, blue, and gold metal embossed ribbon.

Growing up, my mother would often tell me, with a twinkle in her eye, I had a streak of crazy in me like my grandfather. Over the years, I’ve found crazy to her was positive. It meant the ability to think outside the box... to sometimes go against norms.... and to focus on something wholeheartedly. My grandfather was the last of 6 sons of a farming family in Ewu, outside of Shanghai. Legend has it, his father was an orphan and a prolific gambler. His smartest decision was to quit gambling after he won big. He used the proceeds to buy a piece of land. That led to a rice paddy, rice wine production, and special ham operation. Being an orphan, my great grandfather resolved to have his kids go to the best schools to gain status in society. The first would go to Bei Da, (Harvard of China) and come back to the town and become a mayor. The second and third continued the profitable farm operations. The fourth and fifth became doctors, and the last, my grandfather became a chemist. He also went to Bei Da... not the type of school you would expect a farmer’s  son to attend. He always had a chip on his shoulder, something to prove. He was the youngest and the smallest of his family and compensated for this with his mind and observations. Growing up he would often tell me, “see the problem, solve the problem.” He would explain phenomena like the Doppler effect, or distillation, etc... always asking and prodding his grandkids to think. 

His term through school was fraught with danger. For a couple years, the students went west to Kunming to study as the Japanese advanced into China. Upon graduation, he first worked designing paint formulas, and then served in the military as a chemist. After the war the feud between the Nationalists and Communists threatened the mainland. On a scouting trip to Taiwan, he was amazed to find an island ruled by Japanese, where the sugar was white, and the watermelons sweet and plentiful. He convinced my grandmother and a couple nephews to move with him to Taiwan with the Nationalists. There were 2 ferries to the Taiwan the day they departed.   The boat carrying my grandfather and his family survived the journey and made it safely to Taiwan... they witnessed the other boat meet disaster and sink in the straits. 

My grandfather taught physical chemistry at the Taiwan's National University. On the side, he taught himself acupuncture. As a kid, I would see him place needles in others. He was always inventing something or another, a distiller, a tofu machine, etc... but his claim to fame was a sterilization process for saline solutions used in hospitals. I can’t tell you how many times our family members listened and endured his hour long recount of this process. It’s ingrained in all his descendants. A copy of paper he had published in Science about it was buried with him in his grave. 

“When I went to the hospital, I saw all these people shaking. Fa do fa do (speaking half English half Chinese. Fa do means to shake)” he said  while shaking his body showing what the symptoms looked like. “Nobody knew what was happening. But I started to look at the sterilization process to find the cause. At that time, glass bottles of saline were put in an autoclave, the steam would enter the machine, people would take the bottles out and give it to patients... and sometimes the people would shake ad have very bad reactions. There was something happening in the process. I noticed that some bottles were slightly yellow and brown, while others were clear. I thought the temperature must be uneven in the autoclave despite the steam and it was reflected in the slight differences of color.” By now, he was drawing an autoclave and the bottles with a ball point pen on scrap paper. His writing was like a Chinese farmer’s-- bold dark lines and unkempt. Then he would ask, “do you know what the problem was?” Shame on you if your attention strayed and forgot the answer from a previous telling. “In science, you must see the problem, then solve the problem.” Here he brought the story up to seeing the problem. The solution was deceivingly simple. “I made an escape valve for the autoclave. When I first start the machine, the valve would be open, letting all air out as the steam came in. After a period of time, the valve would be closed, and the steam could fill the chamber at uniform sterilization temperature. All the bottles would appear the same color. No more fa do.” By now, the sheet of paper would be dotted with equations like pv=nrt, expansion of gas laws, etc... apparently without a valve, dirty air would be trapped to condense and contaminate bottles. For this process and idea, he received a patent and made a significant income. 

The crazy part of  my grandfather extended to his raising of kids. At one point my 4th aunt received a toy piano. My grandfather noticed if he played a note, she could tell him what it was. If he played 10 notes together she could do the same. With no musical talents himself,  he brought her to a local school to play on a real piano. He beseeched music teachers to develop her talent. With his patent winnings, he eventually bought a piano. At that time pianos came into the harbor from overseas and cost a year’s salary... $40,000. My mom recounted the day the piano reached shore, and was loaded on a flatbed trailer pulled by bicyclists through town to their 2 room house for 6 kids and 2 parents and installed in the room to the amazement of onlookers. At nine years old, my aunt was an established concert pianist and had outgrown the island. My grandfather sent her to the conservatory in Germany to refine her craft. The two younger siblings followed suit. That’s why half my mother’s family has European roots now. Their minds are a mix of Chinese and German cultures.

My grandfather never stopped tinkering, even when he retired and immigrated to Boston. At our house, he would splice trees together, plant tiger lilies, make his own pungent yogurt. One time he came up to me and asked to shave off a mole that was growing on his face with hairs coming out. He had noticed wounds heal better when the don’t get wet. I thought he was crazy, but after the mole was shaved, he put a clear piece of packing tape over the bloody wound. Within a couple weeks, the mole was gone, the cheek was smooth and clear. For all the patent books he would receive, he would carefully peel off the embossed ribbons and save them in a plastic bag like a stack of delicate butterfly thin trophies.

I didn’t speak to my grandfather for several years before his death. When I had learned to sail, I discussed my wonder with him about sailing into the wind. The Bernoulli effect is such that air moving at a higher velocity on the front face of the sail rather than the back will cause a lower pressure situation and hence a vacuum sucking the sail forward. The same principle is employed in airplanes for flight. My grandfather was incredulous. He thought you’d always have to have the wind blowing at the back of the sail to propel a sailboat. We had discussions about this that they turned heated...  to the point of yelling! All I wanted to do was take him on the water and show him the amazing feeling of gliding on the water sailing into the wind. He thought I was an idiot. I took him on the water... he had a makeshift pendulum device with styrofoam balls to indicate the direction of the wind as we sailed. I took pictures of us sailing the Charles river with the balls being blown backwards. He never would admit the Bernoulli effect despite the pictures. We ceased communication. 

As the 4th of July fireworks over the Charles River lit up the night sky I thought of my time sailing with my grandfather years ago on the same river... fireworks and all.

Central Park

Dakota building 72nd street and Central Park west (John lennon’s apartment building)

Upon seeing a photo of Yoko’s great grandfather while visiting japan John Lennon said “that’s me in a former life” to which Yoko replied “don’t say that, he was assassinated!” The great grandfather was a powerful banker murdered out of jealousy.

When he was 40, John Lennon was finally starting to come out of seclusion of (in his own words) baking bread and being a house husband. He had spent the last 5 years raising his son, Sean. He wanted to start making music again. to inspire John on his new creative journey, Yoko arranged for Lennon to sail a boat from Newport to Bermuda. Sailing had always been part of his life. His father was a sailor and he had grown up in a sailing town, Liverpool. It was a port where American rock and roll records would come in with the boats. Growing up, his band was inspired by this new music and would listen and emulate American rock and roll legends like buddy holly, the Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry and turn it into something new with an English perspective. When asked how he first learned to create songs, Lennon replied, “first I took a song that I like, then I changed the lyrics, and then I changed the melody for a new song.” while taking care of his son Sean, Lennon would play his favorite songs of theirs in his apartment overlooking Central Park.

On the voyage to Bermuda, Lennon’s boat encountered a tremendous storm. One by one, the crew members went down sick. When the captain asked Lennon to take the helm, he quipped, I only have these puny guitar muscles. He did take the helm and successfully rode out the storm, recounting, “Once I accepted the reality of the situation, something greater than me took over and all of a sudden I lost my fear. I actually began to enjoy the experience and I started to shout out old sea shanties in the face of the storm, screaming at the thundering sky.” Lennon also compared the experience to when The Beatles were at their peak, saying he felt “centered” and “in tune with the cosmos.” An album double fantasy (named after a flower he saw in Bermuda’s Botanical garden) was filled with songs inspired by his voyage and time in Bermuda. He was coming back late to the Dakota with Yoko after recording songs for a new album, when he was gunned down by Mark Chapman... a crazed fan who’d been obsessed with Lennon. Lennon’s prophecy had come true.

Lennon was immediately rushed to st Luke’s hospital on 59th street in a cab. The doctors valiantly tried to resuscitate him, massaging and pumping his heart to no avail. The song that could be heard on the hospital speakers over Yoko’s wails was “all my loving”.

To commemorate his life, Yoko proposed a tear shaped park named strawberry fields that emanates from the intersection of 72nd street and Central Park west and slopes down to the main loop of the park. A black and white mosaic donated by the city of Naples is situated at the center of the tear, with benches around it. Often times you will hear people singing Beatles songs with a guitarist in the background waiting through the air as you pass through. The grades in the park are very gentle. Always curvilinear, you feel them slip into the park. They never seem to end, curves always round hills or mounds so you never know where they lead. A light green patch of sunlit grass draws you in, before you know it, there’s a meadow overlooking skyscrapers, or a playground, or a collection of boulders. Thousands of men and so much dynamite were used to sculpt the land especially at the southern end of the park. It is artificially made nature. The effect of this large human intervention is to create such a natural fluid environment that frees people for activity, contemplation, discovery and delight.

Imagine mosaic (Lennon memorial)

Sitting on the benches by the imagine mosaic, and looking up at the sky through the tall trees, it’s hard to imagine a time when central park didn’t exist. Landscape architecture takes decades to realize... it’s not like architecture where buildings are assembled in a couple years.... it’s a slow art form. Even a complicated project like the Sydney opera house only took a handful of years to construct. A tree may take decades to mature. For this reason, landscape architects must have tremendous vision and foresight. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely father of Central Park than Frederick Olmsted.

Olmsted was supposed to attend Yale in the 1800’s but a bad case of sumac poisoning in his eyes derailed his college plans. Between sailing to China as a deck hand to failing at multiple attempts at farming to filing bankruptcy for a magazine venture to documenting the daily lives of slaves in the American South as a journalist for the New York Times, nothing in Olmsted’s early life trajectory would’ve suggested that he would go on to change the face of American cities, start the landscape design field profession in America, find success in securing public access to Niagara Falls, and help create one of the first national parks in America, Yosemite.

In August 1857, 36 year old Olmsted found a job supervising a new public works project— Central Park. For 5 million dollars, (or the price of a single luxury apartment lining Central Park today), NYC had acquired 778 acres of land in 1853. The land was filthy and squalid, with the stench of rubbish and pig sties and slaughter houses abound. Rocky, swampy and treeless... one cannot imagine the land would eventually be transformed into Central Park.

Olmsted initially worked under retired military veteran, colonel Egbert Viele who would curiously come to work in dressed in military attire. As you would expect from a military mind, Viele’s plans were very functional but dull. Unsatisfied with Viele’s lack of imagination, the city announced a public competition.

Half dreamer and half pragmatist, Olmsted’s winning ‘Greensward’ plan merged the rational with the poetic. The separation of different modes of traffic was a new concept that Olmsted introduced into the world of landscape park design. First, transverse roads cut into the park in section linking the east side of Manhattan to the west. Second, earthwork berms hid the traffic from the pedestrians above. Third, loops of pedestrian circulation with pedestrian bridges and carriage roads for horses under stone arches interlace the park creating a flowing three dimensional circulation system. As a result, the park is a lot different from the European precedents Olmsted had visited with his father in his 20’s. Instead of formal geometries, Olmsted opted for meadows and woodlands. Central Park was more chaotic than its European counterparts. The pathway design always forking and offering options and different prospects at the horizon reflects a new type of public space, distinctively American and democratic.

To sculpt the land, gunpowder blasting, pickaxes, and horse carts were used to move millions of cart loads of soils. 450 million year old Manhattan schist was exposed, streams, lakes and reservoirs were designed and controlled with an intricate system of piping and valves. The entire nature in the park is like an artificial stage set.

The ambitious project occupied Olmsted’s whole heart. He would remark, “If a fairy had shaped a job for me it could not have fitted me any better. It was naturally outgrown of my previous life history. and it occupied my whole heart.” Olmsted worked himself to such exhaustion that he fell asleep while driving a carriage with his family in the park one day. The accident left him with a leg so badly broken that one of his legs would remain 2 inches shorter than the other for the rest of his life. While he was recovering from his injury, his staff would have to carry him around the park. At times he would crawl on the ground to better survey construction progress. Olmsted maintained that for his designs to be robust, he needed to design with a 40 year outlook in mind. Plants and trees need time to grow in, and new activities are always being introduced to daily life. It’s staggering to imagine that within 150 years of its conception, Central Park has accommodated the advent of cars, recreational sports like basketball, baseball,and tennis, children’s playgrounds, bicycling, electricity and large scale concerts— Olmsted had designed Central Park with such foresight, that it could accommodate all these activities seamlessly.

After Central Park, parks became a central part in American life. Suddenly it seemed every city in America needed a great park came to Olmsted for assistance. Indeed, Olmsted and his sons would go on to transform 355 public landscapes in America including Buffalo, Boston, Niagara, Washington DC. Similar to how Lennon modified American rock and roll music to make Beatles music, (English digesting American culture)... Olmsted adopted formal landscape ideas from England, and transformed the English park idea to become more American . Under his guidance, parks in America became more democratic and open for all people to enjoy. Parks also became more integrated into the city with the 3 dimensional circulation systems and traverse roads. (Integration into cities was further developed in the Emerald Necklace of Boston with the concept of a system of parks integrated into the city, not just one park). This concept of democracy was very important to Olmsted, as he witnessed a lot of injustice in his travels to the south where he observed the effects of slavery and inequality. The democracy wasn’t just limited to races though, when they first started phasing Central Park’s opening, the first attraction that was opened to the public was the pond in the south for ice skating. Ice skating was an activity that both women and men could do together. We take it for granted today, but back then in America it was quite a radical idea that women and men could be equally mobile in public places. (It’s funny women at that time wore such huge dresses they could not tie their ice skate laces by themselves, so there were people by the rinks whose sole job it was to lace women’s skates).

Pythian Building 70th street

The Pythian sits like a sphynx on on 70th street, quite out of character to it's brownstone townhouses of the neighborhood. I walked past this building everyday for 6 years on my way to work before learning of its significance in a newspaper article. In the words of a New York Times architectural historian Christopher gray, "The Pythian Temple’s ground-floor colonnade, with Assyrian-type heads, is centered on a brilliantly glazed blue terra-cotta entry pavilion. The windowless middle section steps back at about 100 feet up, with four seated Pharaonic figures similar to those of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. Two more setbacks rise to a highly colored Egyptian-style colonnade, and to giant urns carried by teams of yellow, red and green oxen." The building was originally designed by theater architect Thomas Lamb to serve as a lavish meeting house for the secret society, the knights of the Pythias established after the civil war. It originally contained a gym, billiards, bowling alley, 13 lodge rooms.

Like the sphynx, the sands of time have cloaked its secrets. For those willing to peel the layers of time from the building, an unexpected reward about it's role in rock and roll history is revealed. (Side note: Before Koolhaas became Koolhaas, he had spent a year researching the history of certain New York City buildings like Coney Island, New York athletic club, and Rockefeller center. His resultant book ‘Delirious New York’ would become the theoretical underpinning of all his later work about urbanism. He studied in depth the adventurousness and craziness of New York architecture, and unpacked it for his own projects). As membership declined, the Pythian building was converted to recording studio. It was the site where bill Haley recorded ‘rock around the clock in 1954.In 1958, buddy holly moved to nyc. Up till then, he had usually recorded in Clovis New Mexico, west of his hometown in Lubbock Texas. He recorded a new song at the pythian in October 1958 with an elaborate orchestral arrangement. that song "true love ways" was intended as a wedding present to his new wife, Elena, whom he had recently married 4 months prior. Two months prior to their marriage they had gotten engaged after their first date! Buddy had been smitten with Elena. within a few hours after he had first summoned the courage to ask music publisher receptionist, elena, on a date, he had proposed and by the end of the night they were engaged. Their wedding kiss picture is mounted on a wall at PJ Clarks restaurant over table 53 at 63rd street in midtown Manhattan commemorating the date.

“Her date with Holly was her first date with anyone, Elena said. When he proposed, she recalled, “I said to myself ‘Is he insane or what?’ I said to Holly, ‘Do you want to marry me now or after dinner?’ ””

Four months after the True Love Ways recording, Holly and Valens, and Richardson went down in a plane crash in the midwest Iowa while touring the Midwest states. it was called the day the music died. holly meant so much to so many musicains. at the nobel literature award ceremony in Stockholm, Bob Dylan, who saw holly in concert on that ‘Winter Dance Party’ tour 4 days before the plane crash recounted, "Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction,” Dylan said of seeing Holly on stage. “Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened, he looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn’t know what. It gave me the chills.”

In England, holly's music was equally moving to young high schoolers John Lennon and Paul Mccartney. they would skip school to play holly for hours. To the liverpool duo, buddy was unlike any musician at the time. Holly showed them the possibility of writing their their own songs, playing their own guitar solos, creating songs from 3 simple chords, writing their own lyrics and, for John, wearing glasses without being self conscious.. in a tribute to holly, the pair named their band new band the "Beatles" alluding to the buddy's backup band insect name, "The Crickets". up till then john would never wear his glasses in public. He was blind as a bat. McCartney tells a story how one night after jamming guitar together, Lennon walked home without glasses. playing cards story. Mccartney told a story where john told him he was so incredulous that he saw a couple people playing cards outside their house at 11:30 on a winter’s night. The next day, when Paul walked by the house, he realized what John had thought was a card game was actually Christmas nativity scene, Jesus, Mary and the baby lit up on someone's yard! John’s eyesight was so bad he mistook the nativity scene statues for card players! now that john wore his glasses and was able to see.. with Holly’s music in his mind, he was able to see clearly the possibilities of rock and roll music. Their first hit, Love Me Do, was a result of hours of buddy holly jam sessions.