How BIM Helped Walt Disney Build Its Most Complex Creation Ever

“This is, by far, the most complex castle we’ve ever done,” says David Abair, Senior Concept Architect at WDI who worked on the design of the Storybook Castle. “We’ve got a restaurant, a stage show, a boat ride, a walk-through, a meet-and-greet, a grand staircase, and a whole host of support spaces underneath. It was because of this complexity that we knew the process would necessitate a different approach to the design. It was one heavily reliant on 3D modeling and on coordination between all of the design disciplines involved.”

The challenge of the Enchanted Storybook Castle was to create a reasonable design companion to Walt Disney World Resort’s Cinderella Castle while also including a much more modern and complex interior, including a central double-helical staircase, restaurant, fountain pumps, a boat-ride system and its maintenance facility, and a children’s salon, among many other features.

The building does not look exactly like Cinderella Castle, as the Enchanted Storybook Castle is the first Disney castle to feature all of the company’s film princesses. But it does take certain design cues from iconic Disney towers and architectural details, such as its windows and roofs. At more than 200-feet tall, it’s also the largest of Disney’s castles.

Building a BIM Castle in the Cloud. The Enchanted Storybook castle was designed entirely in 3D, and the WDI team used a building information modeling (BIM) process that took cloud collaboration to new heights. This allowed easier sharing of models, less rework for communications, and better detail. BIM-enabled collaboration using web-based social, video-telepresence, and cloud-based computing also brought together dozens of team members in both Glendale and the Shanghai construction location, allowing key project milestones to be delivered successfully.

Although the architectural team made the conversion to Revit software, the Structural and MEP disciplines within the WDI team continued to use AutoCAD. To facilitate data exchange between the disciplines, the team developed an in-house workflow as well. Custom scripts allowed design files to easily and automatically provide a daily output of architectural Revit information for the other disciplines.

Many disciplines—142 in all, including architects, engineers, and sub-contractors—worked on opposite sides of the globe to design the project together.

“Another challenge was that the design, about halfway through, had to be localized in Shanghai,” said Eric Anderson, AIA, the project integration manager at WDI. “We had two sides of the world in the workflow—in Glendale and in Shanghai. So one of the things we did to disseminate information across the team was to make a BIM information diagram to show who is responsible for what and how their information is being passed down across the globe.”

Because of issues with Internet connectivity in China, the team used a cloud-based construction collaboration platform called Buzzsaw to transfer updates to the BIM model back and forth between Glendale and Shanghai.