Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Nina Hofer
This paper attempts to provide a model for meaning by reading the overlay as potential in a banal – if not bizarre – contemporary project: a Chinese theme park in Orlando Florida. Proposed to prospective visitors as “Authentic” it is in fact an extraordinary collision of temporally and culturally distant spatial concepts and building practices. This paper uses an experimental ‘witnessing7 of the park to lay out a series of spacio-conceptual models for travel as power. These range from looking at the theme park as a Chinese propaganda tool, through Bachelard’s concepts of miniaturization and collection, empirical (Chinese) versus theoretical (American) standards for life safety, spatial strategies of 1 lth century Dream Journey Scrolls, and Feng Shui (the art of Placement) The changing nature of architectural practice instigates a movement from building representations of singular architectural ideas to the constructions of more complex ‘programmatic fields.’ We need neither despise nor formally caricature the polyglot programmatic shifts and collisions of our time. This paper takes a hopeful stance, maintaining that the overlay of resonant paradigms provides an opportunity not realized, perhaps, in the existing construction.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.1995.10
Volume Editors
John K. Edwards
