By: Ray Okamoto; Lisa Rapp, AIA, LEED®-AP; Emile ALano, AIA, LEED®-AP

 We’ve just completed a collaborative effort in the masterful art of storytelling: It’s all in the details.  As architects, we are driven to find design solutions to the mechanical aspects that are incorporated into the overall project. We were extra cognizant about how to deal with “real world” mechanisms at Aulani because of Disney’s unflagging commitment to the story they are telling and what they want the property to convey.

For the Disney team, the “story” and the customer experience is the goal. This means the architects and builders must find unique ways to make a functional part of a building/property.

For example, Disney encouraged us to take special care in making sure that everyday items such as fire sprinkler heads, speakers, mechanical grilles, piping and hose bibs were not located in places that weren’t “believable.” Items protruding from stone columns, wood beams, or “existing” rock walls, were frowned upon, and our goal was to make these items disappear into the background and become invisible to the guest.

The attention to detail by the Disney team is exceptional. If it doesn’t work with the story, it gets changed. In one instance, a steel column, designed to blend in, didn’t quite work once in place. So, instead of “working around it” to try to make it work, following Disney’s direction, we relocated the column and footing so that worked for the story and then re-attached the roof framing. The Disney Imagineers drew us into the process. When we worked on “Aunty’s Beach House” (the kids’ club), we put ourselves in Aunty’s house on the North Shore — what would the sink look like, the countertop, the garage converted into a workshop? They took our detailed drawings and their research and vision and mega-amplified it until it became uncannily real — down to the jalousie windows programmed with “real” rain and wind effects, making it okay for the kids to be inside watching a movie rather than enjoying the outdoors.

That’s when it really clicked for us: Our job, as Architect of Record and to make Disney’s story a reality, was compared to movie-making. A movie tells a story and tries to draw the viewer into its world. But, if in the production, for example, you see a microphone drop into the scene, it takes you out of the story for that moment and compromises the experience for the viewer. That was the thought process throughout the project.

The project brought out the best of our creative teams and challenged our skills at making their vision work — of finding solutions to ensure the story is told well. Our experience with the Imagineers at Disney makes it clear to us why they are the masters of storytelling.