“It’s clear that I am not the Cavalier Bernini, but it’s also clear that you are not the King of France.” This message was faxed by Aldo Rossi to his “friends at Disneyland” on 11 October 1988.¹ Its casus belli was the project for a large hotel at the Euro Disney Resort, today Disneyland Paris, on which Rossi had been working for several months. According to the surviving correspondence, the Italian architect was tired of receiving “minuscule critiques” and abruptly decided to end the relationship. While many narratives could be drawn from this document, the reference to Louis XIV shines a light on a particularly important theme: the balance of power between architecture and its changing patronage.

This reference appears also in Karal Ann Marling’s Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, one of the most thorough research projects on Disney’s built environment. Although it does not mention Rossi’s fax, this study makes multiple comparisons between Walt Disney and the Sun King. For example, in their essay “Disneyland: Its Place in World Culture,” Yi-Fu Tan and Steven Hoelscher write that “both have vast powers—technological as well as human—at their command.”² In this case, the analogy revolves around the construction of idealized worlds in the form of heavenly gardens, juxtaposing the royal retreat in Marly and Disneyland. Though the structure of the “vast powers” that supported these efforts is left unexplored, linking someone or something to the Sun King inevitably generates an association to a very specific form of power—a political construct that was defined in Westphalia a few years before Bernini’s voyage to Paris and, over the following three hundred years, operated as the primary engine for modernization: the State. Louis XIV was the embodiment of this idea and recognized himself as such when he stated: “L’État c’est moi.” As noted by Louis Marin, his architecture was the locus where modern statehood was expressed and—in every sense of the word—constructed.³

Marin was also among the first European intellectuals to show interest in Disney. As early as 1973, he began to study Disneyland, framing it as “a degenerate utopia.”¹ This was one of the first of a long series of attempts to read Disney’s new “landscape of power.”² Simultaneous to Marin’s reading of Disneyland, another major discourse on the architecture of power had been developing on both sides of the Atlantic. Its focus was on the dissolution of the modern Nation State, a process initiated from amongst the debris of World War II. Zygmunt Bauman described this process as a “mutilation of the Leviathan,” underlining the demise of the Westphalian model and the emergence of a rift between power and politics.³

In Leviathan 2.0, Charles Maier identified the 1980s with a general reaction against State authority.⁴ This was the period in which Michel Foucault began to write about statehood as a form of domination, arguing that the problem of the time was to “liberate” society from the State and its institutions.⁵ On the other hand, there was also a growing resistance toward alternative types of authority.⁶ Fittingly, in his 1993 “Letter from EuroDisney,” Jean-Louis Cohen presented Disney’s executives as evil witches and had French President Jacques Chirac play the role—of course—of Snow White.⁷

Rossi’s interaction with Disney reveals a similar tension. As noted by the architect himself, for the majority of his career, his clients were primarily Italian comuni—the local appendages of the State.⁸ One may even add that most of his key projects were sited in cities administered by the Communist Party, from Modena to Gallarate. In fact, from a very young age, Rossi had been deeply involved in that ideological milieu.⁹ From this perspective, Rossi’s reference to the King of France speaks to a certain difficulty he experienced in dealing with a major non-State client, which, to make matters worse, tended to operate as a State. After all, the theme parks were often referred to as Disney’s kingdoms.

Telling the story of the Cavalier Bernini in a fax addressed to the Director of Real Estate Development of the Euro Disney Resort (listing Michael Eisner, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, in carbon copy), was clearly a display of cultural power—a way of demonstrating intellectual superiority. Additionally, the message was written in Italian, further expressing Rossi’s unwillingness to meet them halfway. Notably, this was the period in which Pierre Bourdieu published his work on the notion of cultural capital, forwarding the idea that anyone could acquire a cultural good, but only those with “embodied cultural capital” could fully consume it.¹⁰ Eisner undoubtedly prided himself on belonging to the latter category.¹¹ In a recent interview, one of his employees was very keen to share that Eisner grew up in a house with abstract paintings on the walls and, therefore, could cultivate his particular taste in art and architecture from a very young age.¹² What is certain is that he did not pass up the opportunity to consume Rossi’s letter: as soon as he read it, he had it framed and hung in his office—just like a work of art.¹³

The Louis XIV provocation played very well at Disney’s headquarters. Upon receiving the fax, Eisner flew Rossi all the way to the United States on his private jet, told him how much he enjoyed the Bernini reference and, after a long negotiation, convinced him to accept two projects in Celebration and Los Angeles, which would later be followed by other collaborations.¹⁴ What sounded like a slap in the face turned out to be Rossi’s passe-partout to Disney’s coffers. Douglas Moreland, one of the project managers involved in Disney’s endeavours with Rossi, explained this U-turn by arguing that people want what they can’t have, especially at Disney: Rossi’s rejection of Eisner made him a must-have. But Moreland also noted that Rossi perfectly fit the profile of Disney’s ideal architect. In corporate jargon, those belonging to this typology were labelled “black-cape architects”—an expression that alluded to the motif of the one-of-a-kind artist, the visionary genius in the footsteps of Frank Lloyd Wright.¹⁵ From this point of view, Rossi’s trajectory can be understood as that of a red architect turned into a black-cape architect and then quickly assuming the status of a blue-chip architect.

As for the framework in which this transformation unfolded, there is an important indication at the beginning of Rossi’s message: “I just read the last facs [sic] sent to my friend Morris Adjmi about our project for Paris.”¹⁶ Notwithstanding the misspelling of the word “fax,” this note sheds light on how Rossi’s practice was set up at the time: Rossi’s “friend” Morris Adjmi was actually his business partner and managed the American side of the operation from the satellite office Rossi opened in New York City in 1986. Rossi also had a network of smaller offices in other countries, such as Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. His projects, clients, and even employees were becoming increasingly international. As such, Rossi’s back-and-forth with Disney should be read as a dialogue between two multinational organizations that were operating in similar markets.

At the time, the fax machine was the primary trait d’union.¹⁷ And it wasn’t just a technology to communicate with clients and collaborators. In the last decade of Rossi’s career, most projects were actually developed on the Milan-New York axis, with the two offices sending drawings and other documents back and forth via fax. For example, if one wants to research Rossi’s project for the hotel at the Euro Disney Resort, most of the material is only accessible on long scrolls of fax paper. This speaks to an important transition from working in multiple nations to developing the projects within a multinational framework. While the digital revolution evidently transformed the entire scenario, the fax machine points to a peculiar inter-mediate phase during which architectural design began to undergo a process of globalization, all while paper was still the discipline’s indispensable medium.¹⁸ No traditional authority could fully exert control over objects that, while being tangible, existed in the form of infinite possible copies, in multiple locations.¹⁹

Notably, while Rossi was writing his polemic letter in 1988, I.M. Pei’s renovation of the Louvre had just been inaugurated. It was the crown jewel of a broader renovation of Paris promoted by François Mitterrand. And, again, the protagonist was a non-French architect. Even though Mitterrand was a socialist, he envisioned the Louvre as the symbol of power par excellence and as a key device in his policy of grandeur, to the point that a large section of the public accused him of reviving an old royalist tradition. According to Irving Lavin, in the face of such criticism, the President did everything he could to reassure his architect: “I will not abandon you as Louis XIV abandoned Bernini!”²⁰