What he also found was a life-sized Disney town elaborately designed in the style of Baron Haussmann, the French urban planner who, under Napoleon III, transformed Paris into the fussy gilded museum it is today. With the faux chateaux and the painted shutters and the clipped lawns, Val d’Europe was, Sillem saw, a fictionalized, idealized version of France … in France. But that wasn’t even the weirdest part. The weirdest part was that many stretches of the village were eerily empty—like a pre-dawn movie set. Or as Sillem describes it: a “Truman Show like über-replica of a French village from the last century, which seems to have sprung up overnight.”

(Source: fastcodesign.com)