Night World

Night World was a proposal for a large-scale fantastical playground in central Florida, near the Walt Disney World Resort. Its main focus was as a night-time entertainment center and alternate venue for the vast numbers of people who would be visiting Disney World during the daytime. The plan consisted of four major facilities, with separate “domes” for cabaret, movies, and theater as well as shops, exhibits, television studio, and an automobile spiral all set in the midst of a water park. Most of the complex was to be housed beneath a vast tent structure, similar to the lightweight structures designed by Frei Otto. The focal point of the complex would be a dramatic restaurant tower rising above the site.

The campus of complex fantastical, futuristic structures was defined by curving lines and fluid spaces punctuated by the individual structures. The buildings, although futuristic, were not without historical precedent. The Cabaret Dome recalls Claude-Nicolas LeDoux’s 1775 design for the Besançon Theater. However, the most flamboyant structure was the Automobile Spiral, where Goldberg’s suspended mast structure, first used in the North Pole Ice Cream store, reappears in a new form. Conceived of as a perpetual auto show where cars could be both seen and driven, this was to be a monolithic concrete structure containing a double helix driveway supported from a central mast by a cable structure. The complex was never built.

The plan geometry of Night World was also of interest: located at the intersection of two roads (N/S, and E/W), the water area was laid out as a vast circle - and the free form shapes were arranged in that setting, suggesting a series of commentaries on the circle in the orthogonal, or how the free form fitted within the regular. Seen within the larger context of Goldberg’s work, Night World is one of the more creative and exploratory projects.