EPCOT (concept)

thumb|250px|The city's central commercial areas and Cosmopolitan Hotel. Concept art by [[Herbert Ryman.]]

thumb|Overlay of the 1966 plans for EPCOT (orange) and contemporary situation (blue)

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) was an unfinished concept for a planned community, intended to sit on a swath of undeveloped land near Orlando, Florida. It was created by Walt Disney in collaboration with the designers at WED Enterprises which would later become Walt Disney Imagineering. Based on ideas stemming from modernism and futurism, and inspired by architectural literature about city planning, Disney intended EPCOT to be a utopian autocratic company town, although he struggled to somehow include residents in community governance. One of the primary stated aims of EPCOT was to replace urban sprawl as the organizing force of community planning in the United States in the 1960s. Disney intended EPCOT to be a real city, and it was planned to feature commercial, residential, industrial, and recreational centers, connected by a mass multimodal transportation system, that would, he said, "Never cease to be a living blueprint of the future".

Following Disney's death in 1966, EPCOT plans were shelved. In 1971, Walt Disney World emerged, with Epcot opening in 1982 as a theme park and influencing the nearby community of Celebration, Florida. Elements from the original EPCOT vision endured, shaping aspects of the modern Disney World park, such as the monorail system and the utilidor system.

History

Forerunners of Disney's EPCOT plan include Tomorrowland in Disneyland, which already featured monorails and PeopleMovers, and the Monsanto House of the Future (1957), which was designed by architects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Architect/planner Victor Gruen's plans to convert the site of the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair was also a significant influence on EPCOT, Disney Imagineer Marty Sklar said. Concerned with the "urban crisis" of the time, which he believed was one of the biggest problems facing society, Disney also consulted urban planning literature, including books by Ebenezer Howard, founder of the architectural "garden city movement", and Victor Gruen.

Location

Numerous locations were proposed for EPCOT, including St. Louis, Niagara Falls, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and New York City's World Fair site. Disney also considered incorporating an experimental city into his plans for a Palm Beach, Florida development with RCA and investor John D. MacArthur in 1959. Eventually, Central Florida was chosen. The plans for "The Florida Project", officially dubbed Disney World, called for a Disneyland-style theme park and resort area, EPCOT, an industrial park, an airport, and an entrance complex.

Disney quietly purchased undeveloped swampland in Osceola County and Orange County using dummy corporations to avoid price gouging. By June 1965, Disney had acquired 27,433 acres—twice the size of Manhattan—for an estimated $5.1 million ($ in ). The official announcement was made on the previously planned November 15 date, with Disney joining Burns in Orlando for the press conference.

The film, utilizing concept art and highly technical animation, was a start to the conceptualization of EPCOT. The EPCOT philosophy, as it became known, included showcasing the development, testing, and use of new materials and ideas from American industries to find solutions to urban problems. EPCOT would always be in a state of becoming, the philosophy detailed, focusing on the needs and happiness of residents, and generating demand for new technologies.

Master plan and community site

Disney personally sketched a master plan for the Florida property known as the Seventh Preliminary Master Plot Plan, in 1966, the year of his death. The main features of the plan included the theme park, hotels, campgrounds and motels, convention facilities, the EPCOT city and a satellite community, a golf course, a "swamp ride", an industrial park, a tourist trailer camp, a main entrance, and a "jet airport". In addition, a monorail would run the length of the property, north to south.

The EPCOT city, according to the concepts presented in the EPCOT film, was based on a radial plan, a design inspired by the garden city movement of urban planning. Based on a concept similar to the layout of Disneyland, the city would have radiated out like spokes from a central core. There, guests would ride people-movers to see warehouses and research and development laboratories from American industry. Plans identified the airport in 1966 but were not present in the revised plans in the later 1970s.

City center

EPCOT's downtown and commercial areas would have been located in the central core of the city, away from the residential areas. The entire downtown would have been completely enclosed, unaffected by the outside elements. Roy Disney stated that "The pedestrian will be king" in this area, free from the danger of cars and other vehicles.

At the center of the area would be a 30-story Cosmopolitan Hotel and Convention Center. This building was to have been the tallest in Disney World and could have been seen for miles. The parking lot for hotel guests would have been located underneath the city core, right off of the vehicle throughway.

On the "roof" of the enclosed area would be the recreational area for hotel guests. The pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, shuffleboard, and other activities would have been located here. According to Imagineer Bob Gurr, Walt Disney pointed to one of the benches on the scale model of the area and declared, "This is where Lilly [his wife] and I will sit when this thing is finished, taking everything in". The show centered around an Audio-Animatronic family presenting the progress of household technology from the turn of the 20th century to the then-present. Guests were seated in an outer ring of six theaters that rotated around a fixed, circular stage. The show's theme song, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," was written by the Sherman brothers and reflects Walt's upbeat view of progress and American industry.

When the Carousel of Progress opened in Tomorrowland at Disneyland in July 1967, it featured a huge, one-eighth-scale model called Progress City on the second floor as the show's finale. The model, which could be viewed either on foot or from the PeopleMover attraction, was constructed after Disney's death and was meant to be a visual representation of his EPCOT plans, including the city center and hotel, high-density apartments, greenbelt, and single-family houses. It measured 6,900 square feet and included 22,000 trees and shrubs, 4,500 buildings lit from within, 1,400 streetlights, a climate-controlled center city, an amusement park, sports stadiums, an airport, an atomic power plant, underground passageways, single-family culs-de-sac, electric sidewalks, schools, churches, electric trains, electric carts, and PeopleMovers.

General Electric and Westinghouse had been in merger discussions with the Disney organization, but a deal never came to fruition. EPCOT would be an expensive proposition. In a 1968 print advertisement, General Electric announced that it had "much of the technology needed ... But as futuristic as it sounds, it could be built today." The ad also featured a photograph of Progress City. General Electric was prepared to tackle EPCOT.

Disneyland's Carousel of Progress closed in 1973 and the show was moved to Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in 1975.

EPCOT after Disney

Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966. According to his older brother Roy Disney, Walt was still planning EPCOT in the hospital in the days before he died. Walt used the ceiling grid to lay out a scale plot plan in his imagination, each 24" x 24" tile representing one square mile.

Florida Governor Claude R. Kirk Jr. signed Chapter 67-764 into law on May 12, 1967, establishing the Reedy Creek Improvement District. However, Disney directors eventually decided that it was too risky to venture into city planning now that its biggest advocate was gone. Roy persisted and took the reins on the project, coming out of retirement, but he could not convince the board to build EPCOT. The Magic Kingdom project proceeded with construction beginning the same year under the supervision of Roy, and Walt Disney World Resort opened in October 1971 with only the Magic Kingdom and two hotels. Roy insisted it be called Walt Disney World as a tribute to the man who had dreamed it up.

Even though the city was never built, the Resort represents some of the forward-thinking planning that embodied Walt's idea of EPCOT. Because of the formation of the RCID, Disney could find innovative solutions to the problems of transportation, building construction, supplying electrical power, and waste disposal. Imagineers, including John Hench and Richard Irvine, devised means of waste disposal and sewer transport. The monorail, while mainly an attraction at Disneyland, was utilized as an actual transportation system, taking guests some thirteen miles around the Resort area. The Contemporary Resort opened with the Magic Kingdom as an architectural remnant of EPCOT's modernist aesthetic.

Without Walt Disney's leadership, EPCOT's progress was "seriously weakened". In the late 1970s, Disney CEO Card Walker wanted to revisit the EPCOT idea, but the board was still wary, and all agreed that Walt's EPCOT would not work in its initial incarnation; they thought that no one would want to live under a microscope and be watched constantly. The result of the compromise was the EPCOT Center theme park (now simply known as EPCOT), which opened in 1982. While still emulating Walt Disney's ideas, it was not a city, but rather closer to that of a World's Fair. EPCOT, somewhat true to Walt Disney's vision, revolves around technology and the future in the Future World area. The World Showcase is an embellished version of the downtown shopping area, albeit without the enclosure.

In the early 1990s, the Walt Disney Company built a community on the Florida property called Celebration. It is a planned community that employs some of the ideas that Walt Disney envisioned but on a significantly smaller scale. Unlike EPCOT, which was based on modernism and futurism, there is no radial design for Celebration. Celebration is designed based on new urbanism, and resembles a small American town, but has all the modern conveniences, without the revolutionary transportation ideas contained in the plans for EPCOT. Similar planned communities, known as lifestyle centers, are now being built by other planners.

In the early 1970s, the city of Rotonda West, Florida, near to Punta Gorda on Florida's Gulf of Mexico coastline, was created. The city uses a circular grid layout, divided into eight sections and a central hub, similar to a wagon wheel.

References

External links

Walt Disney's original EPCOT project
Walt Disney Family Museum

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