Back to the Drawing Board: Reviving RAMSA's EuroDisney Narratives.

The Walt Disney Company’s EuroDisney resort and hotels represent a distinctive strand of post-modernist architecture, where corporate storytelling and narrative design intersect. Understanding architects’ intents in this context is crucial for conservation debates, particularly when meaning is embedded in narrative rather than form alone. This paper argues that oral history should be approached not merely as testimonial supplement but as a methodological tool for retracing post-modernist narratives.
Within this framework, and drawing on Gérard Genette’s narratology, oral history operates at the narrative level where intentions are articulated and meaning structured. Using interviews with Robert A.M. Stern and his EuroDisney project leads, this study retraces the narratives behind the Newport Bay Club Hotel, Hotel Cheyenne, and Espace EuroDisney (1992), revealing how Stern’s firm, Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA), negotiated design ambitions with Disney’s corporate storytelling.
By “going back to the drawing board” with original designers, oral history supports conservation approaches that respect both narrative and form. If modern heritage values also lie in “essence” rather than only in “substance” (Allan, 2015), then post-modern heritage values may reside in its narrative ambitions, making these recovered stories essential for meaningful intervention.