The History of the Contemporary Resort!

Did you know that the Contemporary's modular construction was supposed to be the building style of the future?

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You see, back in the late 1960s when Disney was gearing up to build Walt Disney World, they looked to partner with a number of companies for both financial and operational help. This was before the era in which Disney tried to do everything by itself.

That's where US Steel comes in. A few years prior, the company was accused of price gouging by President Kennedy and as a result they had what you would call and image problem.

So the two companies made a deal. US Steel would pay around 50 million dollars to build two of the first hotels on Walt Disney World property. They would own the building while Disney would own the land it was on, and Disney would continue to lease out the land to US Steel as well as run the hotels.

US Steel, or more specifically, their subsidiary American Bridge, thought this would be a fantastic showcase of what they called modular construction, which they thought would be the construction technique of the future.

The technique called for building an empty frame on site, and then building all of the rooms for the hotel in a factory. Each room would have it’s own floor, walls and ceiling, and then the completed room would be shipped off to the site, slipped into the frame and permanently secured.

US Steel thought this would not only be quicker and cheaper, but it would help with noise and heating since every room would have it’s own set of walls. If one team were on-site building the frame while another team was at a factory working on the rooms, you’d be able to, in theory, build the hotel twice as fast.

So US Steel got to work and built a factory 3 miles away from the site of the Contemporary, and by the time they were running at full speed, they were able to manufacture 40 rooms a week.

More often than not, the four and half ton rooms wouldn’t easily fit into the frame as designed, and would have to be refitted, adding time and cost to the project. US Steel originally estimated that each room would cost 17 thousand dollars, but in the end each room ended up costing around 100 thousand dollars.

On top of that, in order to keep the A-frame building from falling off balance, they had to alternate between sides when adding the rooms, just to keep the weight of the hotel even.

The monorail was also an issue. Originally the plans called for the monorail to run through the center of the hotel, but the engineers weren’t able to properly design the building to offset all of the vibrations the monorail would cause. Ultimately they settled with running it off to the side of center, and had to anchor the monorail to the ground instead of the building.

Ultimately the hotel ended up being a construction mess. Disney had to fly in six carpet layers who would rush to add carpet to the 1.5 million square feet of the hotels floor. This team often ended up sleeping in the very rooms they were carpeting to stay close to the job, and would sometimes work up to 16 hour days!

The night before opening day, the hotel was still weeks behind schedule. Disney had already decided that the rooms would not be ready for guests, and the hotel would open later on, however the exterior still needed to look presentable.

So with less than 24 hours before the crowds and press would arrive to cover the opening, Disney ordered four and half acres of sod, and literally anyone on site, from construction workers to executives in suits were called upon to help lay down the sod so that the landscaping outside the hotel would look finished.

And it worked! That morning, even though it ultimately wasn’t, the Contemporary Hotel looked finished. Modular construction would never catch on as the wave of the future, but Disney’s Polynesian Resort, also built by US Steel, would also use the technique. The technique still exists today, but isn’t as widely used as some would have hoped.