Learning from EuroDisney: from Michael Graves’s Hotel New York to postmodern narratives.

During the last decades of the 20th century, The Walt Disney Company, under CEO Michael D. Eisner, commissioned more than 70 buildings from world-renowned postmodern architects. In 1992, EuroDisneyland opened alongside seven themed hotels designed by some of these leading figures. Among them was Michael Graves’s Disney Hotel New York, which originally celebrated the Golden Age of New York before being reimagined in 2021 as Disney Hotel New York – The Art of Marvel. While the exterior remained unchanged, the interiors and narrative were completely rewritten—raising questions about the essence and value of postmodern architecture.

Drawing on Gérard Genette’s narratological theories, this talk proposes a new lens for understanding such transformations and, more importantly, offers a methodological toolkit to explore the stories embedded behind, above, and within these projects, and more broadly postmodern architecture. By foregrounding narrative(s) as both one of its key heritage value and a theoretical framework for analysing it, the talk argues that EuroDisney exemplifies how postmodern architecture might have functioned as a fictional or narrative construct—and asks how such storytelling ambitions can be critically understood, valued, and preserved today.