I've been thinking about theme park design. The Magic Kingdom always gets praise for its spoke wheel design. Eisner and Wells criticized EPCOT's design and delivered DHS with self-praise on its layout. With DAK, they went back to basics and copied the MK design. The MK has inherited problems, such as the fact that Main Street is where people must enter the park and also leave the park, creating a bottle neck.
My idea is to kind of an inside out version of the MK design. The dead center of the park would be a multi-story building, functional on the inside but iconic on the outside. The building would house WDW's first in-park hotel, shopping, bars and restaurants, theaters, and a 360 degree observation deck on its roof. The basement of the icon would function as the park's entrance, ticket center, emergency and guest services, and transportation hub.
Around the basement levels of the icon's outer rim, would be transit connections (underground monorail) to other WDW destinations. These lines would cross the park at multiple levels underground through the park's footprint. Another underground level would have people mover links to eight small parking structures located all around the park's parameter. A road would circle the park and have off-ramps to each of the eight parking structures. There would be two people movers per parking structure line: one line would go from the center to the parking structure directly, and a second would go from the center to the half-way point before reaching the edge of the park and then continue to the edge of the park and would not go to parking. In other words, one gets people in and out of the park, and the other helps people move through the park. Around the center ring would be wide walkways, as well as a wide moving sidewalk. The very center of the park's underground hub could rotate at the same speed as the moving sidewalk and have a restaurant like the one in the Land.
What do you think? It keeps crowds distributed evenly throughout the park, while also making it easy to get around every where throughout the park without having to walk a lot. The use of multiple stories in the center would thin the crowds out there, as the center would probably be the most crowded section of the park.
My idea is to kind of an inside out version of the MK design. The dead center of the park would be a multi-story building, functional on the inside but iconic on the outside. The building would house WDW's first in-park hotel, shopping, bars and restaurants, theaters, and a 360 degree observation deck on its roof. The basement of the icon would function as the park's entrance, ticket center, emergency and guest services, and transportation hub.
Around the basement levels of the icon's outer rim, would be transit connections (underground monorail) to other WDW destinations. These lines would cross the park at multiple levels underground through the park's footprint. Another underground level would have people mover links to eight small parking structures located all around the park's parameter. A road would circle the park and have off-ramps to each of the eight parking structures. There would be two people movers per parking structure line: one line would go from the center to the parking structure directly, and a second would go from the center to the half-way point before reaching the edge of the park and then continue to the edge of the park and would not go to parking. In other words, one gets people in and out of the park, and the other helps people move through the park. Around the center ring would be wide walkways, as well as a wide moving sidewalk. The very center of the park's underground hub could rotate at the same speed as the moving sidewalk and have a restaurant like the one in the Land.
What do you think? It keeps crowds distributed evenly throughout the park, while also making it easy to get around every where throughout the park without having to walk a lot. The use of multiple stories in the center would thin the crowds out there, as the center would probably be the most crowded section of the park.
