Originally posted by joepoe
I did not think the Swan/Dolphin monorail story was made up. I thought that the original idea was to have the monorail go through these hotels, and the original design had to be modified when it was decided at the last minute that building more monorail track and building more trains would have been cost prohibitive.
It seems that one or more captains on the Friendship Boats (the boats the connect the Epcot resorts with Epcot and Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park) keep telling Walt Disney World guests the "interesting fact" that the black areas on the facades of the Swan and Dolphin can be removed to accommodate future monorail beams. The story has been repeated on Internet bulletin boards and Web sites. And it's undoubtedly been repeated to friends, family, and co-workers by WDW guests.
There are two versions of the story. One version claims that the spaces behind the black areas are big empty voids. The other version claims that they are filled with "temporary" hotel rooms that can be removed.
It's a good story, but it isn't true. The black squares are simply design features to make the large facades more interesting. Architect Michael Graves likes to use of dark and light areas or different materials to break up building facades. I don't know if the captain(s) honestly believe the monorail story, or if they're just having some fun at the guests' expense.
Around the same time that Michael Graves designed the Swan and Dolphin, he also designed the Hyatt Regency La Jolla at Aventine (in California) -- which has three black squares on its facade (see
http://aventine.com/frameset/hyattset.htm ). Michael Graves' office tower at Aventine (see
http://aventine.com/frameset/officeset.htm ) only has a single black square on it.
By the way, the black areas on the Swan and Dolphin are substantially different in size (about 5 stories tall on the Swan, and about 10 stories tall on the Dolphin) and in elevation (starting about 7 stories up on the Swan, and starting about 10 or more stories up on the Dolphin). I'll have to count the exact number of stories the next time I visit WDW.
They're much taller than they would need to be to accommodate a monorail.
If the beam did go through the Swan and Dolphin, there would not be a logical place to put a station. The beam would be way too high, and the buildings aren't nearly deep enough.
If the builder and architect had really wanted to leave paths for future monorail beams, they could simply have left openings. If they wanted to hide the holes, why did they make the "covering" black instead of really hiding them by dressing them up to look like the rest of the building? Why would they put in "temporary" rooms? (Look up at the black area any evening, and you'll clearly see that there are rooms and people up there.)
One more point... Take a look a the shape of the Dolphin. Where would the elevators need to be to reach the upper floors? Yep; the elevator shafts go through the center of the area behind the black square.
Let's go!
