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

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EPCOT is full of iconic shape language that evokes grand ideas about cities, innovation and the potential for design to make the world a better, more integrated place. These iconic EPCOT designs were evident as far back as Walt’s original site plans for the Florida project, where EPCOT was to serve as the literal and conceptual “center” of Walt Disney World, where one could live, learn and experience innovations that would later come to define everyday life as we know it.

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.

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.

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Shannen Michaelsen