The theme park often became the vehicle of corporate ideology. Disneyland’s “Tomorrowland,” for example, once housed General Electric’s “Carousel of Progress,” a film-and-slide dreamland that presented the idea of progress, or “better living,” through commodity technology. Visitors sat in a theater section that moved forward around the carousel after each of a series of tableaux of a family of natural-looking robots in a middle-class kitchen. The sequence progressed in 20-year increments, from the turn of the century on; between each section the audience was encouraged to sing along with the robots, “It’s a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day. Man has a dream and the dream can come true.” The robots grew imperceptibly older, and their clothing and the decor changed to reflect the styles of the time, but the most significant changes, which the family was always showing off, were in the kitchen’s electricity-based home technology. The circular motion of the carousel expressed the idea that this technological progress would be endless, endlessly satisfying human needs.

As a miniutopian retreat from the stresses of city life, it reevokes the notion of “garden” as idealized landscape (the return to a preurban Eden), attempting to reconnect it to the idea of technology as an aid to man. The same attempt lay behind the 19th-century utopian communes of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, which abandoned the city for the countryside; the Ford Foundation building seeks to address similar issues, but integrates itself with the urban community and urban park that surround it. More recent corporate atriums have increasingly separated themselves from the city fabric. Today, there is a proliferation of separate, self-contained, competing corporate atriums, which tends to vitiate the radicalness of the Ford Foundation model. Emilio Ambasz’s just-completed San Antonio Botanical Conservatory stands as a critique of this trend, and as an attempt to rethink the questions raised by the atrium form.