Look, Mickey, No Kitsch!

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Eisner is ambitious in the best sense. Like the founder of his company, or an overgrown child, he thinks big and will not take no for an answer. He wants to redeem Walt Disney's dream for Epcot -- it was supposed to be an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow -- by creating a new town on 3,800 acres at the southern end of his Florida fiefdom. Eisner's vision is a mixture of the predictable ("the biggest mall in Florida"), the high-minded ("I've been obsessed with creating a new chautauqua") and the intriguingly original ("We want to build workplaces, pilot factories"). He has already rejected schemes by Stern and Gwathmey Siegel. A design competition going on among Helmut Jahn, Charles Moore, Aldo Rossi and the firms Arquitectonica, Morphosis and Kohn Pedersen Fox has so far produced accepted designs by Jahn, Moore and Rossi. Trying to realize this biggest dream has been "a nightmare," Eisner says. He doesn't know exactly what he wants, but he wants it to be amazing, and he wants it badly.