22 Cite Spring 1992 Planned Effervescence 's World of Coca-Cola Pavilion

KARAL A N N M A R L I N G TLANTA has yearnings to be a the fall of the Confederacy. At Jacobs' objets d'art on view in conventional world-class city. Its successful bid Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta, a soda museums were doomed to be in short for the 1996 Summer Olympics, jerk mistakenly mixed ihe greenish supply: the story of Coca-Cola called for topping ufi the Cinderella sensa- Pemberton syrup with carbonated water, ads, real soda fountains, vending machines, Ation of the 1991 World Series, puis it in the and a soft drink was born. It was wildly radio jingles, and T V sets. So, while the running for at least two more weeks of successful and became the Souths first Coca-Cola saga was serious business, international fame. Meanwhile, there are - national and international consumer pro- especially to Atlantans, the pop-cultural 01 wire, until August 1990-serious duct. Coke was, in other words, just about artifacts necessary to sustain the narrative impediments to Atlanta's becoming an all- everything Atlanta aspired to be: up-to- were of the type usually dismissed out of American city, too, something more than a date, famous, profitable. "Coca-Cola," hand as Madison Avenue kitsch - or worse. regional business center or an appendage to wrote Marshall McLuhan, "is known to an airport. The city had no landmarks, more people than any other man-made Nor were there workable models for such no symbols, no tourist magnets to speak of, [thing], including the Eiffel Tower." an enterprise within American business unless you counted its tree-lined streets, culture. Some companies, including Coca- Atlanta used to be mighty proud of its Atlanta sorely needed an Eiffel Tower in Cola's Atlanta offices, had set up small foliage. All the promotional brochures men- the 1980s - a Times Square, a big neon displays ot product related material in their tioned the abundance ot trees, along with Coke sign. But throughout the decade the lobbies or waiting rooms as a kind of the 23-story lobby-atrium of John Port- city's best-known corporation, the owner of corporate decor. The bottling plant in man's Hyatt Regency Hotel and the Allman the best-known trademark in the world, Etizahethtown, New Jersey, claimed (and Brothers. Nature and culture. was all but invisible in the symbolic life of still claims) to house the largest private the community. As it turned out, the Coca- collection of Coke paraphernalia in the l A survey taken among prospective visitors Cola Company's iconographic withdrawal world, accessible lo the public at SI a head. by the state tourism bureau a few years back lasted only as long as it took to design and When such quasi-museums were more than fabricate the best electric Coke sign ever a distraction for salesmen cooling their fc\> listed Tara (from Gone With the Wind), the Underground (a retail and entertainment built - a revolving neon circle, 23 feet in heels in the lobby, however, they tended to complex lucked under the railroad viaducts diameter, bearing the familiar brand names be waiting areas for visitors beginning a constructed in the 1920s to ease downtown and encased in a latticework globe pro- plant tour. And by 1978, according to Jane traffic congestion), and something having grammed to spin in the opposite direction and Michael Stern's compendium ot road- to do with Coke as prime tourist attrac- at one-and-a-half revolutions per minute. side amazements, the days of the factory tions. Rut Tara existed only in the imagina- The hegemony of multinational cola, the tour were already numbered. tion of Margaret Mitchell, Underground glitzy .splendor of modern Atlanta: Coke's Atlanta was temporarily defunct, and the extravagant gesture said it all. Apart from a couple of sawmills and last visible symbol of Coca-Cola's contribu- quarries, and the Ohio assembly line where tion to the economy of Atlanta and the The [ i n n had also been planned Willi the the Etch-A-Skctch toy was put together, genesis of the New South - a giant neon corporate history of Coca-Cola and its only the food industry still routinely ad- "spectacular" affixed ro a nondescript advertising firmly in mind. In scale and mitted the curious to see how beer, candy building in Margaret Mitchell Square in complexity, the new sign rivaled the bars, cheese, pretzels, sausages, pepper 1948 - had winked out forever on New legendary electric billboard that had hung sauce, cereal, frozen cheesecake, and maple Year's Eve 1980. above New York's Times Square, at the syrup were manufactured. Fears of indus- intersection of Broadway and Seventh Ave- trial espionage and ruinous lawsuits filed by Thousands gathered that night to say nue, since 1920. Its use of an animated non-employees claiming injury on the goodbye to the old red sign in what had pinwheel pattern behind the script of the premises led most big firms to rethink com Canned videos. been Atlanta's own limes Square, thanks to Coca-Cola logo alluded to the beloved old pany policy on tours in the 1970s, despite the elegant pinwheel of light - the place sign in Margaret Mitchell Square. Set in the public relations benefits attached. where friends met for lunch, where out-of- motion on 7 May 1990, with a speech by General Mills abandoned the practice after towners were directed to turn to get to the mayor and all due civic solemnities, the 1978 season, for example, although the the capitol. The sign was the city's most the new 13-ton, 830-square-foor colossus tour of the Betty Crocker Test Kitchens had important landmark. But neon was too also came attached to a ready-made become a Minneapolis institution. Other old-fashioned and tacky for a hustling, Atlanta tourist mecca called the World businesses opted to replicate what the bustling city of 23-story hotel lobbies that o f Coca-Cola. factory did for a postindustrial audience was pining for municipal stardom. So the weaned on theme parks. Coca-Cola sign came down. The hits and HE new Coca-Cola "pavilion" pieces that were left after the wrecking crew (so called in the official corporare A case in point is Chocolate World in had finished were encased in blocks of lingo) opened to the public in Hershey, Pennsylvania, dating from the Lucite and sold as souvenirs. August. It occupied a onetime mid-seventies. The plant itself, on Choco- Tparking lot along Martin l.utber King, Jr., late Avenue (where the street lights look Tin' Lui thai somebodi had turned .i pint Drive, with the revitalized Underground like Hersheys Kisses), no longer welcomes it on the deal is not out of character for Atlanta to the west anil the dome of the guests. But the nearby visirors' center Atlanta. A Minnesota Twins fan in town capitol to the east. Shoehorned in simulates the process of making candy in for the third game of the 1991 World Series between the after-hours fizz of the night- an amusement-park-style ride beginning on wis appalled to find that you win in club district and the massive neoclassical an African cacao plantation, complete with Atlanta and you sing 'Taking Care of dignity of government, the ambiguities of jungle sound effects. There is even an Business.'" Business (or "binis") is the heart the site reflected some of the contradictions interlude called "You Be lbe < oco.l Bean" and soul of Atlanta and has been since the inherent in the very idea of a World of in which the tourist is roasted and toasted 1880s, when the town threw off its agrarian Coca-Cola. On the one hand, this was in a hot, red tunnel in a make-believe past (except for all those trees) and created intended to be a major-league, 45,000- chocolate plant. The finale is. of course, the modern, entrepreneurial New South on square-foot museum, displaying more than the gift mall, lull ot Kisses and apparel the ruins of its real-life Taras. Coca-Cola 1,200 items of rare Coke memorabilia and decorated with them. Cranberry World in was invented by druggist John S. Pembcr- tracing the history of the company s rise to Plymouth, Massachusetts, inaugurated in ron in 1886 as a nerve tonic and general global prominence. The nature of the 1977, has no ride but does demonstrate the pick-me-up for Georgians still shaken by product, however, meant that the usual ins and outs of growing, harvesting, and 1 23

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Sign of Good Taste: Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates, architects, Coca-Cola Pavilion, Atlanta, 1990.

The Pause That Refreshes. Liquid assets. processing cranberries in a series cit engine, but promoters noted that the of an ersatz factory. One of the first pavilion serves Coca-Cola best through its dioramas, cut-aways, and model bogs. The largest crowds inevitably gathered around interior features commissioned for the visual civility, which reinforces a symbiotic bogs surround a bilevel structure the Ocean exhibits from which a finished product, Atlanta pavilion, in fact, was a kinetic relationship between Atlanta and the drink Spray cooperative describes as a pavilion, borne aloft by a welter of clanking display tilled "Bottling Fantasy" (con- that used to be styled "the holy water of built both to give something tangible back mechanical doodads, emerged triumphant. structed in part by Coke's own engineering the American South." The new sign, for to the community and "to enhance the Thus at Chicago's Century ol Progress of department) - an industrial conveyor that instance, hangs inside a hollow rectangle understanding of the cranberry." 1933, the New York World's Fair of 1939, mimicked the bottling process without the thai effectively shields it from the view of and the 1958 Exposition Universelle in fuss and muss of actually making a single the government center, while beaming an What Hershey and Ocean Spray under- Brussels, C !oca-Cola set up as promotional ounce of what the 75th Coca-Cola slogan, appropriate promise of pleasure and leisure stood was the fascination of moving parts displays actual plants thai filled and sealed coined in 1969, called "The Real Thing." ('The Pause That Refreshes") straight at and processes; discarding the manifest the famous "Georgia green" bottles to be Hut the lineage of The World of Coca- Underground Atlanta. The back side of the inconveniences of the genuine article, they sold to fairgoers. Despite occasional devia- Cola, rooted in neon "spectaculars," work- building consists of font linked rectangles: kept some of the kinetic energy of the tions - the futuristic Coca-Cola building ing factories, and fairs, also raised ijues- the empty one. which serves as the entry factory, the syncopated sound and motion at the 1964 World's fair in New York tions of decorum, given the civic promi- portico, and three others variously faced in that had mesmerized onlookers since the housed a "Global Holiday" exhibit nence of the site. Although the company limestone or stucco. It looks museumlike dawn of the industrial age. Working re-creating exotic spots around the world probably had the economic clou I in and sober, a neoclassical exercise to appeal machinery had been a high point ot (each with its own distinctive scent) where Atlanta to dangle a neon Coke sign over to the up-to-date postmodern boardroom. American lairs and expositions since the Coke could be found - the model factory, the from door of the capitol if it so chose, The front, however, is all neon, elect ro- Philadelphia Centennial Imposition of or off-site factor)' tour, became the norm the ultimate Si 5 million architectural graphically enhanced neo-Platonism and 1876, at which all manner of goods, from for local trade fairs and international solution proved just respectful enough to semiotic gamesmanship: a red, green, and woven carpeting to souvenir bookmarks, expositions alike. reassure legislators, just stuffy enough to yellow color scheme alludes to old Coke were cranked out as a form of entertain* elevate Coca-Cola above the level of mere crates; a series of punched window soft drink flackery, and just touristy meat, celebrating the bounty of piston and By labeling its new World ol Coca-( "ola openings suggests the configuration of the enough to lure the crowds. gear. Wandering through the world's lairs ol building a pavilion, the corporation take-home carton; a big red cylinder (a the late 19th century, Henry Adams was deliberately invoked the spirit of the fair: Coke can, perhaps?) marks the door; and a corner of the facade is supported not by a tempted to trace the decline of Western fun, raz/.le-dazzle, a bree/.y contempo- Designed by the local firm ofThompson, column but, like the company itself, by a civilization to the rise of the mighty Corliss raneity, and high-powered p.r, in the form Ventulett. Stainback & Associates, the 24 Cite Spring 1992

Coke bottle — an 18-foot cubified Coke ton, D.C., Coke's exhibition the video of bottle, made up of lighted slabs of thick Coke factories around the world (surprise, green glass in homage to the distinctive they're all pretty much the same!) shown hobbleskirt bottle patented in 1915 (the on a television set inexplicably located prototype rests inside, on the third floor). TIME behind a structural pillar. Put back the noise and the color framing the artifacts, The entablature that tops the third-floor and corporate history may be a little easier level of the museum blocks, tying them to swallow. into a coherent whole, illustrates the subtlety with which the competing claims Walt Disney built his parks on the of local heritage and corporate hype have "weenie" model. He located the castle at been reconciled in the design. Like a the end of Main Street, he said, as a kind i lassical Irie/.e. I he entablature is sculpted of visual reward, or "weenie," to move the with the raised script of the old Coca-Cola sightseer pleasurably along toward the logo. By day, this bit of self-congratulatory center of his Magic Kingdom. The World signage is shadowed and all but invisible, of Coca-Cola seems to work along the especially on the Washington Street side, same lines when all its constituent parts are facing the capitol. By night, when Under- functioning. Great and serious moments in ground Atlanta comes alive, the letters .ire company annals are introduced and then dramatically backlighted and visible for "topped off by bubbling doses of pure blocks around. 1 lot music, ('old drinks. Boris Arnybasborf. Worttl & Frirnd, Time, May 1950enjoyment. , ranging from the DeLuise "Things go better with Coke!" dashing from one experience from the outside, despite its touches of to the next. That is certainly Madison Avenue pizzazz, the building true of the earliest material, conveys a sense of cubic mass and enclo- on the third floor, including sure. But inside it is a true pavilion - light Pcmberton's formula book and airy, a series of open catwalks and and patent application, the rooms suspended in a vast space contained first Cod-Cola calendar within the four segments. Furthermore, (1891), the original hording the quadripartite division of the exterior is contract, and the model for nowhere apparent. Beginning on the top the 1915 bottle Raymond floor, from which the self-guided tour Locwy once called "the most gradually descends toward the of perfectly designed package'' H all gift shops at ground level, the visitor in the world. All these items passes through a series of variously sized and more are crammed into galleries, theaters, and viewing areas (that glass display cases lining the is, a sequence of windowless enclosures) walls of a cramped, dark k 1 connected by light-filled ramps and room. Within the cases, the skywalks affording glimpses of the outside artifacts are explained by Sranlcy Kubrick, Dr. Strattgtlove, 1964. world. The effect is quick, episodic, and mounted photo blowups and texts forming burlesque to a real, old-fashioned, working profoundly contemporary, something like dense, planar clusters. In the Margaret soda fountain, the largest high-definition watchingaTV program punctuated by Woodbury Strong Museum in Rochester, TV screen in the , a Star , commercials just long enough to allow a New York, where this same technique is Tours-style soda fountain of tomorrow fast dash to the refrigerator for a Coke. used for displaying cultural artifacts of the that shoots jets of Coke 20 feet in the air, industrial age, the didactic panels are and (!hih Coca-Cola, where free samples much larger, much better lit, and generally of soft drinks popular in other countries JL placed in unglazed, freestanding arrange- are dispensed. In the old-time drugstore, ments that approach the condition of alas, the customers cam drink the Soda sculpture. In Atlanta, everything has been jerk's concoctions, but they can play a flattened and shrunken, resulting in a jukebox stocked with excerpts from old museum so conceptualized* miniaturized, radio commercials and promotional songs and sadly diminished that key items, such (the best of the lot a 1909 ditty titled as the talisman ic bottle, are all but lost "When the Do-do Bird Is Singing in the in the murk. Coca-Cola Tree"). The international soft- drink samples - a cloying, flower-scented i£t4AM^0Lui To be fair to Staples & Charles Ltd. of beverage from Japan, and Beverly, a bitter, Washington D.C., Coke's Jean LagamguCi House of Glass. 1975. The architecture presumes a short attention exhibition designers, a high span on the part of the MTV generation and percentage of the memora- relieves the tedium of learning about the bilia in the corporate genesis of the original formula or the archives was two-dimen- evolution of the bottle by alternating short sional, small in scale and all "bites" of enclosure and information with the same color, hardly the tfWl.* movement through empty connecting stuff of boffo show-biz spaces defined by light and by the refreshing displays. And when 1 took my tour of the upper absence of didactic content. GIFT•••• S reaches of the building, the This is an interesting reversal of the strategy "Bottling Fantasy" was tem- lately adopted by the Disney theme parks porarily boarded up for in the holding areas for too-popular rides repairs, while a reportedly such as Star Tours. There, impatient hilarious introductory film tourists are placated by short, intense bursts on the history of human- of dramatic entertainment (enacted by kind's quest for the perfect audioanimatronic robots) separated by beverage, starring comedian periods of quick physical movement up or Doni DeLuise, was no- down ramps through less interesting scenic where in evidence. That left environments. The difference, of course, is the patent, the contract, the that the Star Tours layout presumes the real formula, the bottle, and interest ro lie in the story, whereas, with the lots of dense text as the I ' exception of a couple of stunning interactive principal attractions, along displays, the exhibits in the World of Coca- with a video of Coke factories around Washing- Walker Emm, f AlJn Rinsi. OOmpoddoo from II I.iim> Azzurn, 19HI. Cola are less interesting than the fun of ~oaI Miner's House. Sams Run. VChl Virginia. 1935. Tom Wesulnunn, Still Life *34, 1966. Cite Spring 1992 25

medicinal brew from Italy, i American company Robtn Germanic elf. Moreover, unlike the Jolly assault the taste buds with f prepared to do R.iusdicnbi.'fg, Green Giant or Charlie the Tuna, special vehemence - are 1 business as usual, ll Coca-Cola Plan. Sundblom's Santa easily made the transi- just awful enough to z. is this global aspect 1958. tion from commercial symbol to benign prove that Coke may ac- ^ of its corporate life seasonal icon, without necessarily shedding tually be "the sublimated \ that Coke chooses to all connections with the product that essence of all that America \ highlight in the spawned him. Coke and Christmastime stands for," as Kansas editor World of Coca-Cola - enjoyed their strange, symbiotic relation- William Allen White, another not the anti-Coke ship for decades. enduring American institution sentiments rampant in the proposed in 1938. 1950s, to be sure, but a kind of Coca-Cola also acknowledges its uneasy bland, upbeat onc-worldism best relationship to the world of 1960s pop art In between these big, high-tech gulps of expressed in the 1971 "H by spotlighting a quotation from Andy multimedia fizz come little sips of Coca- top" commercial that Warhol on a wall adjacent to the area Colacized history, dispensed from tall red- produced the song in which great Coke TV spots play and-white cans disguising interactive video "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" ill an endless repetitive loop, not displays that document five-year snippets (the subject of a video presentation near unlike a vintage Warhol film. "You know of the past, from 1886 through 1990. Step the exit from the historical exhibits). the President drinks Coke," according to inside a can, touch a screen, and pick a Warhol. "Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and time. See film clips showing women going Yet Coke remained rooted in the American just think, you can drink Coke, too. A to work (1920? 1945?), great inventions, experience. Boys from Georgia and is a Coke and no amount of money Jersey and Wyoming had all gone off to can get you a better Coke. . . . All of the fight for Mom, apple pic, the girl next Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are door, and Coca-Cola. Around the world. good." Except, of course, the short-lived Coke had rightly come to stand for New Coke. But that 1985 fiasco (along Americanism: by virtue of its sweetness, its with any hint of the ferocious economic success, even its sinister dominance of energies unleashed in the "cola wars" that global markets, Coke was a reflection of the led to the ill-fated reformulation of that national character, an icon of America, an product's classic essence) has no place in emanation from the native soul. This ail- the smiling World of Coca-Cola. Coke American, sometimes vulgar, quasi- calls itself "The Real Thing," and vulgar folkloric aspect of Coca-Cola is precisely Cold War intrigue. The bewildered Bush- realism, like Pepsi, has no place in a what is missing from the sanitized precincts man of The Cods Must Be Crazy (1984) museum of global cntrepreneurship that of the Atlanta pavilion. What about those tries to figure out what a sacred Coke puts a slow, sweet spin on the triumph of an all-American company and the ashes- traces of cocaine in the original formula? bottle apparently fallen from heaven is to-affluence city from which it sprang, • Why did Southerners persist in calling it really for. finally, there's Peter Sellers. "dope" through the 1920s? Any truth to desperate to avert World War I I I . ordering those persistent teen-age reports on the hallucinogenic properties of an aspirin dis- l Wang Guangyi, Gnat Criticism. 1 ') )0. solved in a frosty Coke? Were they totally deluded, those several generations of or the nation at war {1945 again? some- kids who made Coca-Cola the collegiate time in the sixties? 1991?). These "Take 5" contraceptive of choice? videos - a pause for history - are the means by which the encapsulated narrative mfu jn!fiWmmltnli ill unfolding thorough the various Coke signs And then there are the movies, full of and ads and coolers in the display cases is telling Coca-Cola melodrama. The steamy supposed to intersect with real time and Carroll Baker of Baby DoIl(\ 956) sips the great national events. But it doesn't stuff for breakfast and complains that her MM! M M SftMlftttJflllttf 1 ttf actually happen that way. Micro- and husband has left her without a spare bottle macrohistory fail to mesh, in part because in the house. The ebullient Jimmy Cagney the diffuse internationalism of the exhibits of One, Two, Three (1961) plays a bottler imiflmtimmtiKiimtH makes it difficult to identify specific items up to his eyelashes with familiar historical landmarks, in part in Atlanta honey- because most of the juiciest moments in chiles and Berlin the Coca-Cola saga have been omitted in I !. v. ir,| Mttl the name of corporate decorum. Rmicr SMGtd. Jf$ Oil M H H I M A 1950 cover of Time magazine showed a htiiUu perspiring globe gulping down a Coke. The accompanying story stressed the m iii&niififfiiiniifi postwar ubiquity of Coca-Cola: a Coke 3 truculent Keen an Wynn to shoot a Coke stand in front of the Sphinx, a Coke truck machine for change to call the White parked in front of the Leaning Tower of House in Dr. Strangelove (1964). "O.K.," Pisa, Coke delivery vans zipping past the '•— r'.i*f _..»»•';%'.•» Wynn finally says. "I'll get the money for Eiffel Tower and the Houses of Parliament. you, but if you don't get the President of The green bottle with the Spenserian the United States on the phone, you know script. Time concluded, "is . .. simpler, what's going to happen?" "What?" asks sharper evidence than the Marshall Plan or Sellers. "You're going to have to answer to a Voice of America broadcast that the U.S. the Coca-Cola Company!" has gone into the world to stay." So closely was the product identified with American- I In comparison with exotic Coke signs ism that European Communists had taken deployed in markets from Athens to to denouncing the drink as "vile, imperial- Zanzibar, this kind of sexy, funny, home- istic and poisonous," a symptom of grown hagiography seems not to matter creeping "Coca-colonialism." Although much to the Coca-Cola Company - with Coca-Cola's presence on the international two signal exceptions. One is the Santa scene was by no means new - its foreign Claus display, featuring the original designs division was founded in 1926 - the firm's for Haddon Sundblom's famous Christmas < determination to supply GIs overseas at ads. The array of artwork makes it clear stateside prices meant that new bottling that Coke in the 1930s and 1940s actually plants had been btlilt in the several theaters I, perfected I homas Nast's delineation of of operation during World War II. So, •acitr* the American conception of Santa as the when peace came, Coke was the first ,HI H«» tall, jovial antonym of Clement Moore's Marisol luscobnr. Lave. 1962. A