Riddley Shares Connections Cafe Design Secrets
Earlier this week, we got our first up-close look at the new EPCOT quick-service restaurant, Connections Cafe and Eatery. Yesterday, Imagineer Zach Riddley shared the inspiration behind the flooring set to feature throughout the modern-themed space. True to much of EPCOT’s reimagined design, Imagineers again returned to Walt Disney’s original vision for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) when designing the pattern.
“In the new Connections Café and Eatery, guests will discover detailed flooring designs (yes, more flooring 😊) that pay homage to the radial layout and celebrate the purposeful geometry and organic symmetry of EPCOT. As you swipe here, you can see various stages of the process, from the linework to a near-finished product just prior to its final buffing,” Riddley said in an Instagram post yesterday.
“These designs are created with a sustainable bio-polymer material which is 3-D printed to provide an intricate template. That linework is then laid out by skilled craftspeople to create inlays in the poured flooring material, with the final design revealed through rounds of sanding and buffing, where classic and cutting-edge techniques meet,” Riddley continued.
Similar to Connections Cafe, the radial techniques shown in the original EPCOT concept designs run throughout the brilliant design of many Disney theme parks. Specifically, Disney’s hub-and-spoke design for theme park layout that debuted at Disneyland upon its opening. The same strategy continued in the architectural layout of Magic Kingdom, now celebrating its 50th anniversary.
“Have a single netrance through which all the traffic would flow, then a hub off which the various areas were situated. That gives people a sense of orientation-they know where they are at all times. It saves a lot of walking,” Disney said as quoted in Robert C. Ford and Michael C. Sturman’s Managing Hospitality Organizations: Achieving Excellent in the Guest Experience.
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Like all things Disney, the experience is in the details. Certainly, Connections Cafe and Eatery continues that trend as it prepares to open sometime this spring.