By Steven Grant, AIA
Early Life
I grew up in a Levittown-like subdivision of an agricultural/industrial mid-sized city, Kokomo, Indiana. My high school was in the country surrounded by cornfields, and there were no architects within fifty miles of Kokomo. Luckily, my industrial arts teacher mentored me in architecture after school. He was the first of several mentors who had a tremendous influence on my career path. During summers while in high school and college, I worked in construction, installing aluminum siding and asphalt shingles.
Architecture College
Indiana’s first public school of architecture at Ball State University (BSU) is fifty miles from Kokomo in Muncie, another agricultural/industrial mid-sized city. At BSU’s College of Architecture and Planning, I received a five-year architecture program education that prepared me to be a pragmatic and productive architect. Two activities in college that went beyond the pragmatic and that had the greatest impact on my future career as an Imagineer were a field trip to Chicago and a study abroad program.
My architecture class took a field trip to Chicago during our sophomore year. We attended a show in the magnificent Auditorium Theater, by Adler and Sullivan. I was mesmerized by the experience - the performance and the space - and decided that I would focus my studies and time on theater as often as I could. I still get chills when I see an exceptional performance.
The other activity that influenced my career as an architect and Imagineer was Polyark. Polyark was the College of Architecture and Planning’s overseas study program based in London. Until Polyark the only large city that I had visited was Chicago, and I had never been overseas. What I remember the most about London, and the other cities we visited, was simply walking down the street and attending the theater. My time in London influenced what my interests have been throughout my career, which are the theater, gardens and cities. I still attend the theater every week, and my thesis research for my graduate degree in the humanities was on the cultural history of gardens. And I also spend my time in cities walking, finding new spaces and streets.
What I learned from the College of Architecture and Planning at Ball State was discipline and pragmatic problem-solving. This general education in architecture served as a base to begin the more comprehensive education that I acquired by working, exploring and studying after college.
Early Career Path
After graduating with my Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1978, I worked in architecture offices in Chicago and New York City. My internship and first four years out of college were spent at the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM).
I then moved to New York City and worked at an architecture/planning office in Times Square for four years. While there I was able to work on the design of two theaters as well as other urban architecture and planning projects. In New York I was fortunate to meet and marry a woman who shares my enthusiasm for theater and the arts, and we ended up back in Chicago in 1986.
Walt Disney Imagineering
In 1990 I was working in a small architecture office in Chicago. A friend and mentor of mine from my first job in Chicago saw a want ad in the Chicago Tribune for a company called Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI). Although I knew of Disney, I had never heard of their design division called Imagineering. He suggested that we send in our resumes and go work for Disney. I sent in my resume.
A few weeks later, Imagineering HR invited me and other Chicago architects to an interview gathering in a hotel hospitality suite in Springfield, Illinois. To my surprise, the director of the architecture department was a former colleague of mine from SOM Chicago. A month after we returned to Chicago, I received a call from Imagineering inviting me to Glendale, California, for a follow-up meeting where four Imagineers interviewed me. Four weeks later I received a letter from WDI offering me a position as a Project Architect at Imagineering in Glendale, California.
My family and I moved to Glendale, California, in March 1991 so I could begin what became a 28-year career as an Imagineer. After three years in Glendale, I temporarily relocated to Orlando to work on the Magic Kingdom Tomorrowland redo. This temporary relocation turned into a permanent relocation, and I resettled my family in Orlando.
During my 28 years as an Imagineer, I was a project architect, a design manager and the manager of the architecture and interior design departments. Working as an Imagineer was extremely rewarding as every project was different. In total, I was a team member on over one hundred projects, from adding a flagpole to the Epcot entrance to working on large theme park expansions. Fortunately, I was able to be part of all phases of projects from their conception to construction. This broad exposure to all aspects of design and construction made my second career as a professor, where I am writing and developing a new curriculum, possible.
Collaboration and Diverse Disciplines
While artists and craftsmen are not the types of disciplines architects typically collaborate with, Imagineering includes more than one hundred disciplines in its work. This represents an extremely broad wealth of talent and knowledge that architects in traditional architectural practices are not typically exposed to. Theme Park facilities - shows, rides, retail and restaurants - are story based. At Imagineering, architecture and engineering work supports the story tellers, writers, artists and sculptors. Elements of architectural design - line, color, shape, form, space and texture - are used to support the story being told.
Working in large teams at WDI that included a wide range of disciplines was rewarding and challenging. When I was studying architecture in college, collaboration was not a focus. However, during forty years of practice, it became clear to me that the most important skill you bring to a project is your ability to collaborate well.
Architecture education and experience can also be very siloed. This became clear to me as well when I began to work with the multiple disciplines at Imagineering. Architects are taught to be leaders of teams, but they seldom are. That is why it is important that architects be trained to be collaborators.
The hard skills that I used as an Imagineer were space planning, code compliance, programming and systems integration. My soft skills, which were by far the most important skills to have as an Imagineer, were collaborating with many diverse disciplines with different personalities and viewpoints.
While still working at WDI I returned to school in 2013 and obtained a graduate degree in liberal studies from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. It was a life-changing experience! I returned to school because I realized my education lacked a study of the humanities. While at Rollins, I studied history, philosophy, religion, literature, art and culture. My graduate studies ended up making possible my unplanned second career as a professor.
University of Florida’s Orlando CityLab
In 2019 I retired from Imagineering to write, direct and teach a new interdisciplinary graduate program focused on themed environments at the University of Florida’s Orlando CityLab.
When I accepted this new opportunity, I was acutely aware of my limited experience in teaching and complete lack of experience in writing curriculum. However, I did benefit from the skills and experiences that I gained from being in architecture for 42 years, twenty-eight of those at Walt Disney Imagineering collaborating with artists, designers, operators and contractors plus studying the humanities. The knowledge and skills that I used to write and direct this new graduate program have been the following:
-
Knowing a little about a lot of things
-
Making lists (In professional practice I wrote many programs, scopes of work and code analyses.)
-
Team and department management
-
Industry connections
-
Organizing skills
-
A love of learning (I am learning along with my students.)
-
Awareness of the amount of time that teaching requires.
The Master of Science in Architectural Studies (MSAS) Concentration in Themed Environments Integration (TEI) has been a remarkable success! I have students from around the world coming to Orlando to study at CityLab who want to work in the themed environments industry. They begin the program wanting to work at Disney or Universal, but during their studies they learn about all the companies that support the themed environments industry. The large companies that build and run large, themed environments do not do it alone. Dozens of other companies support them, and my students learn about these companies.
With the support, encouragement and help of the University of Florida’s faculty, and the themed environments industry professionals in Orlando, I have been able to write, teach and lead this graduate program that focuses on what is important to be successful in the themed environments industry. What is crucial about the TEI graduate program is that it is interdisciplinary. I currently have students with undergraduate degrees in planning, film, interior design, industrial design, communications, psychology, theater, engineering, hospitality and architecture.
In my wildest dreams as a kid from Kokomo, I never would have thought that I would be collaborating with large teams, made up of over one hundred disciplines, designing theme park facilities, and then being able to teach what I have learned. In my 40-year plus professional career I worked on over 160 projects in different architectural roles. I then returned to school to obtain additional education, and now I am teaching what I spent my life learning. It has been a great adventure and career!
_____________________________________
Steven Grant, AIA is the Program Director of the Master of Science in Architectural Studies Concentration in Themed Environments Integration, at the University of Florida’s CityLab-Orlando. Professor Grant is a licensed architect and a former Disney Imagineer. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Ball State University in Indiana and a Master of Liberal Studies degree from Rollins College in Florida.
(Return to the cover of the July 2023 PM Digest)