The Land, like all of the original pavilions, was built with a sense of discovery to its entry. There's a build up of anticipation that's planned into the arrival. You were to walk towards the towering glass pyramid that was built to resemble a huge geometric greenhouse, with a wide open skylit entry beckoning you towards glass entry doors, with lots of natural light inside. Not the mostly hidden, dark entryway the way it is today, with the huge planter completely blocking any view of the entry from the front. The entry of the land was symmetrical to the entries of the other pavilions around and opposite. Once you were inside, it opened up all around you, and you could just see the boats taking off for the greenhouse underneath, along with the food court down below. You were made - by design - to have to walk all the way around the edges of the pavilion to create a sense of entry and lay out what was to come once you were inside the pavilion, before being given the option to go in to one of the shows, or go downstairs to eat or ride Living with the Land. When you walked into The Land, you took a moment to take it all in, then got (somewhat) excited to go on Living with the Land, with a real human. (Yes, it was a decent ride back then, darnit!)
It's not the pavilion that has a poor layout, it's that Soarin' was never meant to go here, nor is the pavilion used or staffed the way it was designed. Respectfully, I think "keeping Soarin' and bulldozing the rest of it" or opening the ground floor means essentially throwing away "The Land" as a place and admitting that it's just Soarin' now, which I disagree with. I'd rather renovate the pavilion and give it a new lease on life modernizing what it was built to be, rather than just throw all of the marbles to Soarin', which was squeezed in with very little thought.
When I was there last time it was just the down escalator that wasn't working. Seems like no amount of lazy can find fault with a down staircase, can it?
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