Walt Disney’s City of EPCOT Honored in New Connections Cafe

Walt Disney Imagineer Zach Riddley has shared a look at the wonderful deign details of the new flooring of Connections Café and Eatery at EPCOT, which is inspired by Walt Disney’s original “City of Tomorrow” design.

Riddey commented on his Instagram account, "EPCOT has never stopped evolving – what Walt foresaw as a constant “state of becoming.” To this day, Imagineers continue to draw inspiration from those original concepts and ideas for the park throughout the current transformation.

He continued, "Today I’m proud to reveal a pretty cool example of this, in its own state of becoming as we speak."

"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."

"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."

"We have many more details like this our team is hard at work completing in time for our opening later this spring."

Below is Walt's comments on EPCOT in Walt's "Florida Film ", a 24 minute preview to E.P.C.O.T that Walt recorded on October 27, 1966, just a month before his death.

With help from props and animation he outlined, for the media and interest groups, his plans for the Florida Project - Disney World and especially the details for E.P.C.O.T

"But the most exciting, by far the most important part of our Florida project—in fact, the heart of everything well be doing in Disney World—will be our experimental prototype city of tomorrow. We call it E.P.C.O.T spelled E-P-C-O-T: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Here it is in larger scale."

"E.P.C.O.T will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise."

"I don't believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that's more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities."

"But where do we begin? How do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we’re convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community. So that's what E.P.C.O.T is: an Experimental Prototype Community that will always be in the state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future where people actually live a life they can’t find anyplace else in the world."

"Everything in E.P.C.O.T will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who live, work, and play here, and those who come here from around the world to visit our living showcase."

"We don't presume to know all the answers. In fact, we’re counting on the cooperation of American industry to provide their very best thinking during the planning and the creation of our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And most important of all, when E.P.C.O.T has become a reality and we find the need for technologies that don’t even exist today, it’s our hope that E.P.C.O.T will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of people expressed right here in this experimental community."

"Well, that's our basic philosophy for E.P.C.O.T. By now, I'm sure you're wondering how people will live and work and move around in our community of tomorrow, so in the next few minutes we will go into detail about some of our preliminary sketches and layouts. Remember though, as I said earlier, this is just the beginning!"