Babel: Imagineering

Imagine turning the legendary Bruegel painting of the tower of Babel into a three dimensional reality as the focus of a non-profit multilingual, multicultural theme park dedicated to the riches of culture and the world of arts and ideas. A theme park for the rest of us. Like a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground. Taking the basic passion behind an idea like the Experience Music Project in Seattle and Frank Gehry's structure for it but broadening the scope so it's not so narrowly focused on just rock and roll. I mean, if there is serious money devoted to things like the Dracula theme park in Romania and the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando....

Imagine a year round arts festival with a building of the Tower of Babel in, say, Magnuson Park in Seattle, near the Soundgarden sculpture, with an outdoor stage near the waterline. A skate park. A cybercafe in the middle of a huge new and used bookstore ala Powells in Portland, with a huge bulletin board where people could leave their contact information all divided up into sections of the world. A theatre for plays and a theatre for films, different double features every night. Independently run pubs and restaurants from all over, Italian, Greek, Thai, Ethiopian, Chinese, Japanese etc. Literary readings and a set of brick catacombs (like Fellini's in Utrecht) where you can see rock bands, jazz, alternative country, classical... Floodlit at night like the Colosseum in Rome. Be able to rappel up one side of the Tower. A language school for all of the world's languages and a press for multilingual books. The Green Tortoise would have a stop there.

Eddie Sotto, recently Senior Vice President of Concept Design at Walt Disney Imagineering and currently Chief Creative Officer at Progress City, wrote me back after I sent him an email describing my ideas, saying:

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Malcolm,

My sense is that your idea sounds very interesting (I like the juxtapositions of the bookstore, skatepark and language school) and potentially really successful.

Have you taken this idea to developers? It could be really unique.

Thanks for letting me in on your vision,

Eddie Sotto

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If you are interested in helping develop the vision, click here to join the Tower of Babel Imagineers mailing list where you'll be asked to submit your resume/CV via email so we can get a sense of your knowledge base, skills and talents. If you're accepted to join you'll also be asked to join one of the following subgroups of the imagineers (or vice versa).

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