I view the Epcot hub overhaul as a tad bit lackluster, however, I personally do not understand why it is getting as much hate as it is getting.
Can someone please educate me?
EPCOT Center was organized around ideas that shaped its built form, something that is most definitely lacking in the transition from Future World to neighborhoods. Even beyond personal attachments to the ideas and past attractions of Future World, the new World Celebrate is a weaker design.
Themed entertainment is storytelling through built space, and built space is more than just any assortment of buildings. How buildings are arranged and composed shape space and create part of the user experience. It is why standing in front of a church in a piazza (space making objects) is different than standing out in a church parking lot (objects in space). Theme parks are generally built on the definition of space but Future World instead utilizes objects in space, the theme pavilions, as a major organizing principle. The CommuniCore provided a spatially defined center to the theme pavilions, not only grouped East and West but radiating out from the Core. A figure ground map (where the buildings are black and everything else is white) still conveys the unity of Future World as one concept, something distinct from World Showcase that has its own organizational design language. The new neighborhoods have no such built, spatial boundaries. There is no center, no organizing principle, they are a collection of random buildings with no relation to each other or any common scheme. It is suburban sprawl, without definition or meaning that are at the heart of a themed experience.
Going beyond issues of design, the utility of the new festival center seems suspect. By its very nature, a festival center suggests a place of prominence in the seasonal events that have largely come to define contemporary Epcot. Such a space naturally calls for some degree of flexibility, something the presented design complicates. The building is elevated but for no stated purpose. Art shows nothing more than a big empty space at the ground level, so the main area where people are moving and experience the park is devoid of actual activity. The presented design features a few legs and a massive rectangular service core holding up a building with a slim base. The most likely way such a slim profile would be achieved is through the use of a post-tensioned concrete slab, a concrete slab filled with cables that are pulled tight. This type of slab is not very flexible. Anything new in the future that would require anchoring to the floor will be limited in where it can be placed as the anchors must be very careful to avoid those cables. While one would not expect Disney to go about moving walls between festivals, just looking forward years ahead it seems likely that some such changes would be desired at some point. And while that it is not a huge issue, it is still a limitation. Even if another system is used and it is a non-issue, anything brought in to support the festivals throughout the year will be limited to the size of the service elevator. Aside from its height, there is really nothing going into the festival center that is so specialized that it could not have been more easily incorporated into the existing building.
Huge sums, an oversized portion of the Evolving Epcot budget, are being spent on a building that is less useful and less spatially related to its surroundings than the one it is replacing instead of going to other areas of the park.
