The real-estate branch of Disney's entertainment empire is recruiting high-design architects to create cost-effective buildings around Disney's booming theme parks.
IN just four years, the Walt Disney Company has changed from a Hollywood has-been to the hottest movie studio in the country—hot enough to land its animated icon, Mickey Mouse, and its CEO and chairman, Michael D. Eisner, on the cover of Time. Motion picture, television, theme park, and merchandising operations have all contributed to the success of Disney's $3 billion entertainment empire; now the mouse that roars wants to make it big in real estate. Disney Development Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of WDC, was formed three years ago with the express purpose of making more profitable the land that Disney owns around its theme parks. That's a lot of land: 28,000 acres (of which only 4500 have been developed) in Orlando, Florida, home of Walt Disney World and Epcot Center; and just under 5000 acres in France, where the $2 billion Euro Disneyland will open in 1992. In the next two years, DDC will have $400 million of construction in the works, for which it is energetically enlisting a star-studded roster of guest architects, much as the parent company assembles the talent for its movies. Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern, Arata Isozaki, Frank Gehry, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Ven-turi, Rauch & Scott Brown, and Gwathmey Siegel are some of the names in this glittering cast.
The first of these projects to be unveiled, however, is one for which Disney is not the actual client. The $375 million Walt Disney World Dolphin and Swan hotels (P/A, March 1988, pp, 37-38) were developed and financed by a joint venture team that includes Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., Tishman Realty & Construction Co., and Aoki Corp., with Tishman as managing partner. The two convention hotels, which will be located next to Epcot Center and which, when they open over the next two years, will have a total of 2300 rooms, were designed by Michael Graves Architect, Princeton, New Jersey, with Alan Lapidus Architect, New York, responsible for design development and working drawings. The development/ financing team, which, as the client, is actively involved in the design process, leased the land from the Walt Disney Company under Disney's direction, and Disney Development was responsible for the master planning, as well as for bringing the Graves office into the deal and negotiating its fees.
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