While visiting EPCOT today, we stopped into World Celebration Gardens to find an active construction site on the final piece of the puzzle – CommuniCore Hall. When completed, CommuniCore Hall will be the finishing touch for the EPCOT Overhaul project. Of course, quite a few projects were either scaled back or budget cut completely, but that’s a bit outside of the scope of this article.
For now, let’s stay focused on the work taking place within EPCOT right now to finish the CommuniCore Hall festival exhibition space and the CommuniCore Plaza party area. We’ll start with a reminder of what the final product should look like. There have been a couple of pieces of concept art for the CommuniCore Hall building, but we’ll start with the area that’s the most recognizable.
In the concept art below, we can see the northeast corner of the building, which will be home to the Mickey & Friends meet and greet space. Spaceship Earth-style panels will create a familiar look for the exterior during the day, and at night the shell will be backlit to allow for what should be quite an interesting lighting package at night. If we draw our eyes to the left side of the concept art below, we can see a cutout and pillars at what will be the CommuniCore Plaza party area, featuring an outdoor stage and dynamic lighting system.
Here’s another piece of concept art showing the outdoor stage to the left, the Mickey & Friends facade in the distance, and Spaceship Earth as the backdrop. For a look inside the CommuniCore Hall exhibition space, which is outside the scope of this article, check out our earlier coverage.
Back to our visit to EPCOT earlier today, we noticed that not only were crews continuing the installation of the Spaceship Earth-style panels that will act as a sort of semi-translucent skin for the building, but also some finishing touches on the roof of the building as work progresses to a likely Spring or Summer opening.
In this first photo below, we start to approach the construction site from a perimeter walkway that will encircle the World Celebration Gardens once the construction walls ahead of us are removed. This will offer a frictionless walk from Spaceship Earth to World Showcase on both sides of the Gardens. As it currently stands, we can either take a right toward World Nature or take a left toward the Gardens.
For more on what a right turn or a left turn might look like, check out our article below on the updated Early Entry procedure now that the Gardens are open. Take your time, I’ll be here when you’re done reading that.
In our case, we’re going to take neither a right nor a left. Instead, we’ll stay right here at watch the construction for a bit first. The Spaceship Earth-style panels are all hand-placed and installed.
A closer look at the installation shows that there is scaffolding behind the skin of the building, but when that’s removed, there should be some space that creates some wonderful light once the sun sets.
There’s also some wonderful variation in pre-fabricated color on the panels, which will play nicely with a bit of lighting.
Here’s a look at more of the current installation taking place.
Walking along the pathway toward The Land Pavilion and World Nature, we can see some more of the panels as well as some newly installed trim along the top and side of the building.
Shifting our vantage point a bit, we’ll head into the Gardens for a look at the Mickey & Friends section of CommuniCore Hall, as well as the CommuniCore Plaza stage and party area.
From this vantage point, if we keep turning to our left, we can see the overhang for the outdoor stage taking shape. In terms of actual finishing touches, the plaza seems to be behind the rest of the building, but it might be a less complicated finished look too.
Finally, let’s take a closer look at the trim installation that was taking place earlier today.
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!