Michael Eisner Talks About Disney Headquarters Over 20 Years After Departing

In speaking with In Depth with Graham Bensinger, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner talked about the insights into Disney headquarters in Burbank, California, and why he hasn’t been back since 2005.

Eisner Interview

In a recent episode of In Depth, Eisner explained that, despite being invited back, he hadn’t returned to the headquarters since he left. “Once you sell your house, you move on,” he told Bensinger. Despite his departure, the building bears his name and is known as the Team Disney – The Michael D. Eisner building. It is the main building of Walt Disney Studios.

Completed in 1990, the building was designed by Michael Graves, who also designed the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resorts. The building was renamed to honor Eisner’s tenure in January 2006. Of the project, Eisner said Graves (who died in 2015) was the “Spielberg of architecture.”

“Michael Graves kind of introduced postmodernism into architecture,” he explained to Bensinger. “I had just arrived here in ’84. We didn’t have any office space, and we asked him to do that building. I think he did a great job.” Graves was known as a preeminent figure in New Urbanism, New Classicism, and postmodern architecture. Eisner explained that one of the interesting things they added was the animation maquettes on the front of the Seven Dwarfs, which he said were “very postmodern.”

All Seven Dwarfs from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are represented as columns on the front of the building, with Dopey holding up the uppermost roof gable.

Eisner went on to explain that all of the buildings at HQ were done by different architects in entirely different styles. He pointed specifically to the Disney Animation Building, designed by Robert Arthur Morton Stern (Bob Stern), which was completed in 1994.

With that building, Eisner wanted to find a way to make it “fun and animation-ish.” So they added Mickey’s sorcerer hat to the front, which made it “welcoming to the animators.”

Watch the whole interview for yourself below: