by Martin Sklar
It may have helped when, an hour or so earlier, as we began our concept presentation to a very tense audience of those Kraft leaders, I had instructed Hong Kong-born designer Doris Hardoon Woodward to make the presentation in Cantonese. “But Marty,” Doris protested, “they won’t understand anything I’m saying!” Doris was correct, as I knew she would be. But by the time I had stopped her and asked for the English version, the tension in the room was gone. Smiles and a bit of laughter replaced those frowns. We made the sale.
When we made our final presentation to GE’s chairman and CEO, Reginald Jones, he had asked his three vice chairmen to attend the meeting. Shortly after GE signed its participant agreement, Jones retired, and the vice chairman who had been the most inquisitive and critical of our plan became chairman and CEO. His name was Jack Welch. Although GE was in, our concept was out—as were many of the old ways at General Electric. We didn’t have to go through “Six Sigma” training, which became one of Jack Welch’s signatures at GE, but we certainly knew who was “bringing good things to life” as we developed the Horizons pavilion, since replaced in Epcot by Mission: SPACE after GE’s original participation contract ended.
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John L. Tishman, the longtime chairman and chief executive of Tishman Construction, has written a fascinating memoir entitled Building Tall—My Life and the Creation of Construction Management. Among his interesting reflections is a comparison between New York’s World Trade Center—Tishman Construction built the Twin Towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001—and Epcot Center, for which Tishman Construction also acted as construction manager:
Disney’s Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was actually a larger construction project than the World Trade Center had been in terms of the amount of area covered, the number of buildings—each one distinct—and the complexity of all the elements…
…The whole would cover some six hundred acres, which was to be carved out of very swampy land, including some large sinkholes…
Smack in the center of the six hundred acres was a huge sinkhole. Sinkholes are geological formations that can be as old as fifteen million to twenty-five million years. This one had been waiting for us quite a while, and its boundaries were not fixed—regularly, cars and trucks that we thought had been on safe, solid ground would start to sink in and would have to be rescued by a tow truck. The sinkhole was full of organic silt and peat, and the sand underneath went down as far as three hundred feet. Nothing solid could be built on it, since the underlying sand could not support the weight of a building. The most logical thing to do with the largest sinkhole of all was to dig it deeper and make it into the lagoon around which the World Showcase pavilions would be situated.
Simple idea, difficult thing to do. Under our direction, three general contractors specializing in heavy construction worked on the area. First, they had to construct a bathtub containing an area that could be filled with enough water in which to float a dredge to excavate and remove the muck. The muck was five feet thick and there was a million cubic yards of it to be removed so that the underlying sand could properly serve as the lagoon bottom. Complicating the task of removal were two huge “root islands” in the muck. Unable to get them out, we eventually poured onto them a half-million yards of sand taken from another part of the lagoon. Then, top-heavy with sand, the root islands sank beneath the surface of the water and stayed there. Today, looking at the lagoon, you see no evidence of them. But they are there, beneath the surface…
Each pavilion was to appear physically very different from the other nineteen, and many of them were to be quite intricate and unusual, containing such machinery as moving platforms, as well as theaters, restaurant facilities, carnival-type rides, and the largest aquarium in the world.
The way that the Disney Company worked, its “imagineers” first created the basic design for each pavilion, sort of impressionistic sketches for freestanding sculptures and their surrounding environments. Then these sketches were turned over to outside architectural firms that would complete the actual working drawings and details that construction teams could execute. They awarded the design for each pavilion to a different architect… For us, this Disney design system meant that for each pavilion in Epcot, we had to deal with separate architectural and engineering firms.…
Our production schedules were at the heart of our work for Disney on Epcot. Such schedules are the guts of any construction management job; everything flows from them—the final revisions of drawings, the assembling of bid packages for the multiple contractors and materials, and the development of strategies for contracting, purchasing, and staffing. Eventually we produced hundreds of schedules interrelating about two thousand different activities.
The method of scheduling was the same as for the World Trade Center towers, but while during the WTC project the logistics had a vertical axis, at Epcot the need was to plan the logistics on a horizontal axis. In turns, this meant such things as having to plan for and carve out parking lots for the construction workers’ cars, some 2,500 of them each day. We had to create those lots, and a lagoon (where there had not been one) and a major monorail system, as well as major access roads leading to and from Epcot to the nearby highways—and all of this had to be done before any pavilions could be erected…
Design and construction of Epcot was done on a crash basis—in three years, a very rapid timetable for so sprawling a project.
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While Tishman Construction and the general contractors hired for each part of Epcot struggled with sinkholes and the delivery of steel, the Imagineers raced to complete everything from the Audio-Animatronics figures of Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain in The American Adventure to the zoetropes and Magic Palette “hands on” (the term was current at that time) interactive fun in the Image Works area of Journey into Imagination. There were so many innovations that we stopped counting, from the amazing Leapfrog Fountains at Journey into Imagination to the largest continuous projection surface in the world for The American Adventure attraction. Sequentially, it opened from seventy-two feet early in the show to 150 feet wide during the finale.
At times, there was so much going on that our management lost track.
“We hired Mark Fuller [to create the Leapfrog Fountains] because of his work on laminar flow fountains,” Orlando Ferrante, vice president of production, recalled nearly thirty years later, when Fuller received the Themed Entertainment Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “Soon, Mark came to me and said he would need ‘a few engineers’ to work with him on Epcot’s special water projects. That turned out to be nearly one hundred engineers, plus the production people to produce the designs!”
In concept, Spaceship Earth began as another descriptive written idea: let guests entering Epcot walk under an icon suggesting our planet itself. The engineers were not enthusiastic about this major challenge, but John Hench, Epcot’s chief of design, saw the importance of what he called “the geosphere that is the symbol of Epcot.” In Designing Disney, John wrote:
Spaceship Earth offered an impressive invitation to adventure and equally impressive design challenges. We assumed from the beginning that we needed a large sphere for the Epcot icon, and we wanted one with enough space inside for an attraction. We were familiar with architect Buckminster Fuller’s experiments with building the geodesic dome he had invented in the 1940s, including the one he had constructed for the Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1953. Fuller’s famous phrase “spaceship earth” also appealed to us. [Fuller actually visited Imagineering during the project’s design phase.] But he had never made a complete sphere as large as the one we hoped to build. Our engineers said that if we constructed only three-quarters of the sphere, our dome could support itself on a base, leaving the interior space clear…
At our first design meeting, the engineers showed a drawing that pictured a dome sitting directly on the ground. We needed a sphere, however; I asked if the dome could instead rest on a
round platform with legs underneath to hold it up, which would allow us to suspend the bottom quarter of a sphere from the underside of the platform, completing the sphere.
After several days, the engineers concluded that yes, my idea could work, but that it would be expensive.
The geosphere we built was 164 feet in diameter, standing eighteen feet off the ground on three sets of double legs, with more than two million cubic feet of interior space. It has so far withstood winds of up to two hundred miles an hour. It wasn’t complicated at all, really. I was simply able to visualize how the self-supporting dome could be built as a perfect sphere seeming to float on its legs.
This is the sketch John Hench made for the engineers. The completed “geodesic sphere” was, when it was built, the world’s largest, encompassing 2.2 million cubic feet of space inside, with an outside surface area of 150,000 square feet.
Ray Bradbury’s story treatment became the framework for our communication theme, taking us from the cave walls of France to the exploration of outer space. “Where did we come from? Where are we going? How do we get there?” Ray began…and his first draft answer ran fourteen pages!
One of the key assignments in creating the Spaceship Earth show went to Peggie Fariss. It was Peggie’s job to organize the research, including the work of outside academic consultants. What were the key periods and events in world history that advanced our ability to spread communications? What civilizations made quantum leaps forward? What did the people of the times wear, ranging from the royalty of ancient Egypt to the inventor Gutenberg at his printing press?
To assure historical accuracy, Peggie led a research effort that reached out around the country to specialists in the Renaissance, Egyptian hieroglyphics, ancient and biblical languages, and communications. Our primary authority was Fred Williams, founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and professor of communications at USC. In addition, Peggie’s bibliography of books consulted is nineteen pages long, from Cro-Magnon art to Greek language and “Latin graffiti.”
We launched Spaceship Earth with narration recorded by the wonderful voice of television actor Larry Dobkin. Then, in an attempt to create some star power with a voice familiar to our guests, Tom Fitzgerald wrote a great script for a fan of Walt Disney World and Epcot: Walter Cronkite. With changes in the show in the nineties, Tom created a new script for still another amazing voice: that of Jeremy Irons. And finally, with Siemens becoming the presenter of the new and current show in 2007, Pam Fisher created the current narration recorded with Dame Judi Dench.
The ride system was the most vexing issue of all. There were ride engineers at Imagineering who argued vehemently against the advisability of a ride that would rise 164 feet in the air, and descend backward. The first outside ride vendor selected closed its theme park unit after we chose them.… And retreated into transporting supplies in manufacturing operations.
This was one of those classic moments in the development of an attraction when “no” was not in the Imagineering vernacular. Predictably, placing a 180-foot “wienie” at the entrance to a park was so enticing that every guest wanted to know “what’s in the ball” (sometimes “golf ball”). There was no getting around solving the challenge of that huge elevation change from ground level to the 164-foot height, which entailed dealing with the dramatically steep slopes and the heavy, endless chain of vehicles needed to achieve the THRC (Theoretical Hourly Ride Capacity) of 2,571 per hour.
Last, but far from least, has been the challenge faced by every design and production team: designing and installing sets and scenes in a limited space environment where the audience is constantly moving upstream or downstream. Don’t let that “big ball” fool you: once the track envelope was established, the spaces left for show inside the geodesic sphere were extremely confined, often limited by structural elements, with practically no flat or square surfaces. As one show producer told me, “This building does not conform to easy storytelling!”
The original design and production team thought of loading in the show as a giant jigsaw puzzle. All the scenery was finished three or four months before the freight elevator was installed, so that the elevator shaft could be used to haul all the scenes from ground level to the top…because once the freight elevator was installed (and for subsequent changes in the show), all the set pieces had to be built in sections to fit into the limited space.
In so many ways, Spaceship Earth in Epcot represents our desire to communicate the connections all of us share with the past and the future on our fragile planet, expressed so beautifully by poet and statesman Archibald MacLeish. “To see the earth as it truly is,” he wrote, “small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
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One of my favorite projects was The Land, presented by Kraft. We had a great relationship with the participant’s executives, first with Bill Beers and then, when it became Dart & Kraft, with President and COO Arthur (Bud) Woelfle. (It’s now sponsored by Nestlé.)
The original pavilion included two of the major food facilities in Epcot and three main attractions: the film Symbiosis, Paul Gerber’s tour of the world to review the delicate balance between technological progress and environmental integrity, between man and nature; the Kitchen Kabaret, a humorous musical show devoted to telling the story of the benefits of good nutrition, starring “Bonnie Appetit”; and the Listen to the Land boat cruise. Today, the boat ride is still a major feature, but the main event is one of Disney’s most popular attractions in California and Florida: the hang glider–like experience called Soarin’.
Most Imagineers believed the experience that most exemplified “Walt’s Epcot concept”—experimental prototype of the future—was (and still is) The Land boat ride. The narrated, thirteen-minute trip in tandem boats carrying forty passengers (over two thousand per hour) travels at a speed of two feet per second through a story of agricultural development in challenging environments around the world—the rain forest, the desert, and the American prairie—then enters a world of agricultural beauty and bounty. There’s an Aquacell where fish are raised, and three major Living Laboratories: Tropic, Desert, and Creative or Experimental greenhouses. All told, some forty different food crops and sixteen growing systems demonstrate the potential of CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) in a thirty-thousand-square-foot facility where real food from all around the globe thrives, including the lettuce I had teased Card Walker about. Key staples such as rice, corn, sorghum, and tomatoes grow here year-round, and guests often see exotic plants from six continents around the world: African fluted pumpkin, jackfruit, cacao, Java apple, and dragon fruit (from a cactus).
Carl Hodges, then director of the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona, was another find by Peggie. Once we visited his labs, located a few steps from the Tucson Airport, we knew that he and his colleagues had to become part of our Epcot team. Hodges and his agricultural scientists’ work in halophyte research was especially noteworthy, stretching all the way back in time to the civilization of the Aztecs in Mexico who, it seems, knew more about growing plants in saline soil than anyone. The significance of halophyte research is that more than 99 percent of the water on earth is seawater or ice. The development of plants that can be irrigated with seawater has an important potential for the future.
We charged the University of Arizona group with developing the systems for growing food in The Land pavilion’s greenhouse-like structures. To prove the principles, in a controlled environment in Arizona, we had them build and plant a third of the total length of what would ultimately be the Florida boat ride. At the pace the boat would travel, we walked the attraction. We could almost pick the corn, tomatoes, banana squash, pineapples (and lettuce!) as we passed by. It was clear that Listen to the Land would be a winner—it was a thrill just to smell the attrac
tion.
Almost as an afterthought, Carl Hodges asked, “Where do we keep the bees?”
I looked at him incredulously. “Carl, those boats that will be riding through the greenhouse—they will be filled with real people. Bees are out.”
“Well then,” Hodges shot back, “how do we pollinate the plants?”
“Look,” I replied, “we are the storytellers. We’re in show business. You are the scientists. You tell us how you are going to pollinate the plants!”
Today, when you ride the boats or take one of the nine backstage Harvest Tours offered daily and walk through the biomes of The Land, you will very likely see a scientist member of The Land’s team pollinating each plant, individually, by hand. It takes about fifteen hours per week to pollinate the dozens of plants growing in the Living Laboratories, and they have been doing this for thirty years.
At the dedication of The Land in October 1982, Kraft’s president, Bud Woelfle, read a quote from the renowned microbiologist, environmentalist, and humanist René Dubos—words that are inscribed at the entrance to the pavilion:
Symbiotic relationships mean creative partnerships. The earth is to be seen neither as an ecosystem to be preserved unchanged, nor as a quarry to be exploited for selfish and short-range economic reasons, but as a garden to be cultivated for the development of its own potentialities of the human adventure. The goal of this relationship is not the maintenance of the status quo, but the emergence of new phenomena and new values.
The dedication speaker followed. We were honored that the speaker was Dr. Norman Borlaug, agricultural geneticist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient in 1970, who is often called a father of the “green revolution.”