Incomudro
Well-Known Member
They knocked them down because they were useless.
Their time has passed.
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EPCOT Journey of Water featuring Moana coming to Epcot
- Thread starter Rteetz
- Start date
Their time has passed.
mightynine
Well-Known Member
Well, then why did they leave the other one up?
TikibirdLand
Well-Known Member
add the manufacturing cost of a modern car to the equation and you may not be able to say that.
Incomudro
Well-Known Member
Because there's use for some of them, but not all of them.
The time to fill up buildings with edutainment ideas of what the future is going to bring has long expired.
One thing that was glaringly obvious to me when I first took the kids to Epcot some 10 years ago, was that it looked dated.
I used to really love it, but it (parts of it) looked stark and dated.
I'm greatly looking forward to a naturalistic looking side of this park.
Lush, green, water...
James Alucobond
Well-Known Member
While I certainly have fewer problems with what they're currently doing than most, seeing the disconnected breezeways here makes me even more puzzled as to why, even if everything to be included was mandated from the top down, they didn't simply demolish both of the southern buildings in this concept to meet the requirement of cutting the CommuniCore footprint by half while also making way for a centered table-bar. Journey of Water could've still gone in the southwest (perhaps with a leaping fountain section leading to Imagination, extensive rockwork leading to The Land, and a more robust water section pointing toward The Seas), and various kiosks with a more futuristic design could've gone in the southeast. Not an architect, but color me confused.
Soluna16
Well-Known Member
Damn I'm glad they didn't go with this it's awful. More wasted space in the NW corner with expos they would never show and a generic green space in the middle no one would use. Phew dodged a bullet with this design. At least the one they went with has some organic flow.
jt04
Well-Known Member
No Name
Well-Known Member
If one looks dated so does the other. I wish the Epcot grand plan was actually a full solid plan.
Imagine if they weren’t neglected for 20+ years. The buildings had/have plenty of useful life left in them, it’s the utter failure of multiple management teams to properly utilize them.
James Alucobond
Well-Known Member
I'm sure everyone agrees that the negligence is deplorable. However, rehabilitation of existing structures isn't the only acceptable (or even correct) response to it. They obviously assessed how much space they had, how much they were spending on maintenance, and how much measurable profit/value/overall customer satisfaction it was driving and decided partial demolition was preferable. We can and should debate how they could be doing better or using the space and existing structures more efficiently, and it's fine to demand more if what they produce doesn't meet guest standards. That's the purpose of this thread, after all. Continuously bringing up past negligence is kind of pointless, though. They lived with this space in decay for a quarter century and decided it wasn't working for them as originally conceived; no matter what they did, it wasn't going back to its original form, so bemoaning that is rather pointless.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Except they planned to build a less functional replacement…
James Alucobond
Well-Known Member
It no doubt has fewer functions, but that doesn't necessarily make it less functional from management's point of view. I'm sure they see it as making the remaining structure run more efficiently via reduced maintenance and using what space does remain more effectively to house what they actually want in the area.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
No, the festival center would be less functional due to its design.
They did. It was viable. Then Iger insisted on his more expensive folly.
James Alucobond
Well-Known Member
You certainly know more than I do about the inner workings of the company, but I have a hard time believing that Iger dreamed this design up independently. I have to imagine it was one of many options presented by the team working on EPCOT, and he and the management team simply insisted that they go this direction. If you tell me that Iger did in fact draft this design in CAD, I'll believe you, but it seems to me to still ultimately have been a design created at the discretion of Imagineering intended to fulfill vague requirements from the C suite. I would definitely believe that he picked it out of a lineup of designs and told them to forge ahead, but ultimately, Imagineering shouldn't have even put it out there as a suggestion if they didn't want to do it that way.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Walt Disney Imagineering isn’t going to just go hire a starchitect on their own. And they don’t use CAD anymore.
He didn’t - but the bar on legs pitch was chosen from the alternatives offered. I know of at least 4 alternatives.
James Alucobond
Well-Known Member
I'm confused as to what this has to do with the content of the post. I'm simply saying that I doubt Iger actually designed this himself or that the architect of the Festival Pavilion did so in a vacuum. It was part of a larger plan that Iger then picked from among several pre-designed options. He didn't mandate exact placement or force the Imagineers to explore extreme asymmetry as an option.
This definitely makes sense to me. But this would also make me less critical of Iger, not more. You never put anything in front of a client or leader if you don't want to design or build it because they'll invariably pick that option. I would hope all of the options were still things the team felt confident about.
Which would make the leader and the designers as bad as each other.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
You came up with a ridiculous premise that ignores the situation and then declared that since it was not true criticism is invalid.