The Tokyo Disneyland Hotel
The Tokyo Disneyland Hotel holds a special place in my heart, because once upon a time, I actually worked on the design of the hotel. Now, back then, I was a simple architectural intern, and my tasks were pretty limited. Nonetheless, during my time at world-renowned hospitality firm WATG, I had the good fortune to be a part of the architectural team working on the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel during design development, helping gather images, work on presentation boards, and even detail a couple of small decorative elements!
It may not be widely known that Disney sometimes outsources their resort work to other firms. WATG has been a partner with Walt Disney Imagineering for a very long time, starting with its design of the Grand Floridian Hotel at Walt Disney World. Since then, the firm has also created the Disneyland Paris Hotel and provided conceptual support on the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel. The common theme among all of these places? They are of a Victorian style, and the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel is the biggest and grandest of them all. Standing 9 stories tall, it overlooks the entrance of Tokyo Disneyland.
The resulting hotel is every bit as beautiful as imagined on computer and paper, and when I visited Tokyo Disney a couple of months ago, I just had to pay a visit to the hotel to see the reality of a project I worked on a long time ago!
It may not be widely known that Disney sometimes outsources their resort work to other firms. WATG has been a partner with Walt Disney Imagineering for a very long time, starting with its design of the Grand Floridian Hotel at Walt Disney World. Since then, the firm has also created the Disneyland Paris Hotel and provided conceptual support on the Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel. The common theme among all of these places? They are of a Victorian style, and the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel is the biggest and grandest of them all. Standing 9 stories tall, it overlooks the entrance of Tokyo Disneyland.
The resulting hotel is every bit as beautiful as imagined on computer and paper, and when I visited Tokyo Disney a couple of months ago, I just had to pay a visit to the hotel to see the reality of a project I worked on a long time ago!
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| The park-side entrance to the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel at night. |
Could you tell us more about your experience as part of the architectural team working on the Tokyo Disneyland Hotel? I'm really curious! :-)
ReplyDeleteIt honestly wasn't much more than what I described in the post. I was an architectural intern at the time working for the summer. This happened to be my second summer at WATG, so by then, people knew that I was a huge Disney fan. I remember the project just starting at the end of my previous summer, and when it went into design development, one of my project managers suggested that I be added to the team. I mostly helped with graphical related items and putting together things for presentations. But I did get to work on a little bit of the drawings. For example, the Mickey Mouse shaped detailing where the wood posts met beams.
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