I’ve just finished Woody Register’s The Kid of Coney Island, an excellent historical biopic of Fred Thompson, the visionary behind Luna Park. Opening at Coney Island in 1903, Thompson’s brainchild was arguably the first twentieth century american thematic environment. I discovered in Register’s incredible read that Thompson actually coined the term “Amusement Architecture” as the title of an article he wrote for Architectural Review 16 in July, 1909.
I was able to find the entire piece at archive.org, in which Thompson admonishes ‘traditional schooled architecture’ and makes the case that those without formal training are better suited to designing thematic spaces. “The schemes of such a man must be fantastical, even sometimes to an extreme,” he wrote, “for his is more the undertaking of an artist with imagination than of a craftsman whose efficiency is restricted by his subservience to a triangle and a t-square” (emphasis is mine).
The extent of Thompson’s architectural education was off-an-on again work in his teens at his uncle’s firm in Nashville, Tennessee. He never mastered formal skills, and later tried a year of illustration classes at the Cincinnati Art Academy, but grew restless and left. He always referred to himself as a “showman” or an entertainer—never an artist or an architect—yet a generation before Walt Disney, he began the tradition of illustrators and designers developing spaces and thus challenging the primacy of the architect.
“Theatrically speaking, architecture is nothing more nor less than scenery,” Thompson declared to his readers (emphasis mine). He scolded “carefully trained architects who endeavor to make triangles and t-squares do the work of brains and imagination” for not being able to conceptualize entertainment venues for the consuming public. “Straight lines are as hard and serious as baccalaureate sermons…buildings can laugh quite as loudly as human beings…and a beautiful but excited skyline is more important in an exposition [than formality].”
The groundwork for departing from architectural formalism was laid by Fred Thompson at Luna Park. His unwillingness to confine his work to the “triangle and t-square” and his emphasis on an imaginative, illustrative approach to conceptualizing environments is the cornerstone of thematic design as it is now practiced. Thompson’s methodology is the missing link between the Tivoli Gardens and World’s Fairs of the nineteenth century (the latter of which Thompson won an award for architectural design) and the work of the Disney organization, which injected the experience and personnel of Hollywood movie magic—the language of cinematics.