Almost to the day twenty-five years ago, on October 1st 1982, Walt Disney World's second theme park, EPCOT Center opened its gates - combining attractions and exhibitions about future technologies and pavilions of different countries, in some ways like a world's fair. Since then hundred of millions of tourists have flocked trough its entrance, but few of them know about the long creation process that led to the EPCOT Center how it is known today.
It's another story why Walt Disney's utopia of a living city of the future, the original EPCOT, became a theme park, but it was at the beginning of the seventies that the Walt Disney Company seriously began thinking about the new park. From there it took almost then years of searching for ideas, brain storming, concept making, beginning again from scratch, planning and finally building. It is said that the EPCOT went trough 19 major design revisions during all these years.
To begin with we'll have a look at how EPCOT Center was imagined in 1978, just a year before construction started. On the modell shown above Disney theme park fans will instantly recognize the familiar layout. In the foreground the radial Future World with the two CommuniCore buildings - today known as Innoventions - in the center and the early version of Spaceship Earth's sphere, in the background the lagoon of World Showcase with the different countries along its shores. But there are also a lot of differences to the built park - like for example the pavilions planned for World Showcase. In the next installment I'll talk a little bit about these pavilions.
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