Believe it or not, Disney's Contemporary Resort was built with a design first seen in one of the buildings in Walt Disney's original model for Epcot (The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was originally meant to be an entire city, not just a theme park, but the dream died with Walt.)
In the honeycomb design, the building is a giant frame with slots missing. The actual hotel rooms are built in modules in a factory outside of the resort (the factory was located roughly where Port Orleans is today) and then airlifted by a crane and then slid into position.
In the honeycomb design, the building is a giant frame with slots missing. The actual hotel rooms are built in modules in a factory outside of the resort (the factory was located roughly where Port Orleans is today) and then airlifted by a crane and then slid into position.
This started a famous rumor that the modular rooms could be removed every so often and replaced with newer ones, but that since the building has now "settled" into the ground, they no longer slide out and are "stuck".
While it's easy to see where that rumor started, the rooms were never meant to be removed once they were put into place. (How ridiculous would that be?!) Rather, they will be updated every so often from the inside, just how Walt planned for the housing in EPCOT (planned to hold 20,000 people, namely Disney World employees and designers.)
While it's easy to see where that rumor started, the rooms were never meant to be removed once they were put into place. (How ridiculous would that be?!) Rather, they will be updated every so often from the inside, just how Walt planned for the housing in EPCOT (planned to hold 20,000 people, namely Disney World employees and designers.)
Here's a view of one of the modules being transported from the factory to the construction site- complete with windows! The idea was that by making the rooms at the same time as the building you could save time rather than building one and then the other. The estimated cost to build each room (yes, each room) was $17,000. Unfortunately that is not how it worked out and after many trials and errors, hold ups and re-planning each room cost around $100,000. Yikes. It also ended up taking the same amount of time as the rooms took longer to install than previously planned. Ouch!