David Rockwell is currently working on the interior design of the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio, a former military base, in San Francisco. The museum is scheduled to open this year. David had done parts of musuems before but this is his first complete museum project.

He had always been interested in designing a major museum and this one is certainly major. He put every ounce of effort into it.


Photo: Future Site of Walt Disney Family Museum

David Rockwell is founder and CEO of the Rockwell Group. He is an award-winning architect and Broadway set designer. His group recently designed the stage set for the 81st Academy Awards. Some of his other projects include the W Hotels in New York, the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles and Grand Central Terminal renovation in New York City.David actually assumed that there was already a Walt Disney Museum. There had to be. Nope.

David is rarely intimidated by a client. However, he compared meeting the Disney family to meeting the "First Family." He was intimidated by their legacy and accomplishments and the depth of their experience.

Walt Disney was all about taking chances. One part of the museum will be a look at his history. We will see his willingness, his love of travel and transition, his love of newness, and his willingness to rip up the rules and start over. What other artist represents that kind of risk taking and vision and willingness to start over?


Photo: Future Site of Walt Disney Family Museum

This museum will be the most advanced ever built in terms of sound technology. It will be sophisticated, advanced, detailed and totally transparent. Since Walt was certainly influential in our technology, you will experience his fascination with future travel and the future home.

On display will be an extraordinary collection of Walt's artwork and artifacts. It will also show things that Walt made. You will see archival footage of Walt talking. You will hear his story in first person. You will learn about his relationship to his family and how he maintained that. It is his personal story.

Plan to tour it over and over. This this museum is designed for multiple visitations. You could easily take a linear path through each one of the parts and end up at the end. However, you will more likely move back and forth between the extraordinary moments and displays.

The goal is to make your experience spontaneous. It will feel new each time you visit.

You will leave with a renewed sense of the creative world. You will see what is possible. You will have a renewed belief. There are no creative boundaries. You can combine all of your passions.

Source: SF Interior Design Examiner: Walt Disney Museum at San Francisco's Presidio to open in 2009

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Oh man...how I wish I could be there for opening day!

This is going to be such a great thing!

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hope to see it when it opens

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1993 Dolphin
1995 Aunt House
1997 Off Site
1999 Off Site
2000 Coronodo Springs
2002 Port Orleans and All Star
2003 2004 (Off P )
2005 Pop Century -Xmas
2005 Carribean Beach - Disney Wonder
2005 Disneyland- Spring Break
2006 Pop Century - Halloween
2006 Polynesian - Graduation
2007 Pop Century
2007 All Star Sport- Xmas
2008 Port Orleans
2008 WDW College Program

                        

This is a great excuse to head to San Fransico and tour the city again! It's a beautiful city!!

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Cindy
Upcoming 2009 Pop Christmas
2008 BW
2008 DL
2007 CB Christmas
2007 DL Paris Disneyland Hotel
2007 Mother's Day BC
2006 Poly Concerige
2005 DL GC
2003 A S Sp

                        

Finally! A museum in Walt's honor - hope to someday get to visit!!

Thank you, Walt for making our dreams come to life!

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Report by one of the admins of the "Friends of the Walt Disney Family Museum" Facebook page, Leo Holzer! Great info!

GALLERY-BY-GALLERY OVERVIEW

Gallery 1 Beginnings: Walt Disney's Early Years (1901-1923)
Walt Disney was born in Chicago in 1901. In 1906, his family moved to a Missouri farm, where he had an idyllic early childhood and first learned to draw, The farm failed, and in 1911 his family moved to Kansas City, where he rose at 3:30 a.m. to deliver newspapers on his father's paper route and fell in love with vaudeville and movies. In 1917, the family moved to Chicago, where Walt created cartoons for his high school yearbook, took classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and tried to enlist in the U.S. Army. Rejected for being underage, he joined the American Ambulance Corps and arrived in France as World War I ended. When Disney returned to the United States, he settled in Kansas City and got a job at a commercial art studio. In 1920, while working at an ad company, Walt discovered the fantastical world of animation and immersed himself in the young medium. While keeping his day job, he began making Laugh-O-gram ad reels and animation shorts with artist Ub Iwerks, Laugh-O-grams Films soon went bankrupt and Walt, at age 21, moved to California.

Walt's early drawings and mementoes from his childhood, as well as cameras similar to those he used in Kansas City, will be highlighted in the Museum's first gallery.


Gallery 2 Hollywood (1923-1928)
Walt arrived in California in 1923 hoping to find work as a director. But when he received a contract for his own work, he launched Disney Bros. Studio with his brother Roy. By the end of 1924, Walt was focusing on story development and directing and was no longer working as an animator. After several business setbacks, Disney created Mickey Mouse, which established Disney Bros. Studio as the leading animation studio in the country.

With the third Mickey Mouse film, Steamboat Willie, Walt joined the vanguard of the talking-picture revolution by creating an animated film with synchronized sound. Both Walt and Roy Disney married during this period, Walt to Lillian Bounds, a studio inker.
Original artwork, including the earliest known drawings of Mickey Mouse, will illustrate Disney's sensational success with his character. Other exhibit highlights include business correspondence between Walt and Roy, the move to the new Hyperion Studios, where Disney created four of its great animation features, and Walt's meeting with and marriage to Lillian Bounds.


Gallery 3 New Horizons: The Emergence ofthe Walt Disney Studio (1928 to 1940)
The success of Mickey Mouse let Walt Disney expand the newly renamed Walt
Disney Studios and improve the quality of Studio animations, so he embarked on a series of ambitious projects, including the "Silly Symphonies," one-reel shorts that let him experiment with images, music, and story lines. In the following years, the Studio created the first Technicolor cartoons, introduced a multiplane camera to create the illusion of depth in animated films, and developed distinctive styles of
movement and personality in their characters.

Also in this period, Walt and Lillian's family grew to include daughters Diane and Sharon.
The continuing success of Walt's cartoons led to a revolution in the art and technology of animation. Vintage artifacts, animation art, character merchandise, and family photos chronicle the creative explosion of the 1930s, Walt's sudden world fame, and Diane and Sharon.


Gallery 4 The Move to Features: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Having redefined the art of animation, Walt dares to produce a feature-length film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. During the four years that it was in development, Disney and his brother Roy secured six-figure loans - each loan enough to finance an entire movie - time after time, and skeptics called the film "Disney's Folly."
Disney brought in an art instructor to work with his team and insisted that the animators study live models and animals. The studio created a Character Model Department, which constructed small sculptures of characters which let animators study characters in the round.

Snow White premiered on Dec. 21, 1937, and Disney won a unique Academy Award for the innovative movie: a standard-sized Oscar and seven miniatures. Original art from Snow White, three-dimensional model figures, magazines of the period, audio clips, and a wide array of related 1930s merchandise will help recreate the story of Disney's pioneering effort to produce Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.


Gallery 5 New Success and Greater Ambitions
The worldwide success of Snow White let Disney Studios create new studio buildings in Burbank, CA, and produce even more ambitious features, such as Bambi, Pinoccbio and Fantasia. The last featured classical music and an orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

Although well regarded by critics, none of the films was immediately financially successful, in part because overseas revenues were affected by World War II.
Highlights of the gallery will include one of the studio's original multiplane camera cranes, an animator's desk and rare production art.


Gallery 6 The Late '30s to Mid '40s
This difficult period in Walt's life included the deaths of his parents, a studio strike that threatened the company's viability, and a period when the U.S. military used part of the studio as a base. The company released Dumbo and produced training films for the military, public service shorts, and morale-boosting films, and Walt embarked on a goodwill tour of South America to strengthen ties between the U.S. and Latin American countries. He later produced two Latin American-themed animated movies based on the trip.

Photos and union flyers from the 1941 Disney animators' strike as well as samples of Disney films in support of the war effort will be among the gallery highlights. Also on view will be original art from Dumbo and insignias that the Studios created for numerous regiments and squadrons.


Gallery 7 Post-War Rebuilding: Mid-'40s to the early 1950s
With the end of the war, Walt and Roy found inventive new outlets for animation and ventured into live-action production. They developed new package films for theaters that combined shorts and feature-length animated films, as well as movies that combined live action and animation.

In addition, the Studio produced the enormously successful Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp, the studio's first wide-screen animated feature.

Disney also produced his first live-action features, including Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.

Concept and animation art from Disney's films of the period will be prominently featured in this gallery, as well as artifacts from live-action movies, including an underwater camera used in the filming of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and works from Walt's extensive personal collection of miniatures.


Gallery 8 Walt and the Natural World
Walt -- who had a love of nature since his youth in Marceline -- also ventured into live-action documentaries during the '40s and early '50s. The first of these was a nature documentary, Seal Island, a 27-minute account of the seasonal habits of seals that won the 1949 Academy Award for best two-reel documentary.

Later documentaries in the series, "True-Life Adventures" continued to focus on nature, while "People and Places" highlighted peoples and destinations around the world.
Exhibits in the gallery include some of the specialized equipment used in the production of the "True-Life Adventures" series.


Gallery 9 The 1950s and 1960s: The Big Screen and Beyond
This prolific period of Walt's life started with the installation of a scale model railroad on the grounds of his new home, an event that spurred him to develop Disneyland. Walt also created pioneering weekly television shows, and the studio continued creating both animated and live-action films, including the Academy Award-winning Mary Poppins.
Walt was also involved in developing new technologies for installations for the 1964-1965 World's Fair. In the 1950s he announced his ideas for EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

In a 15-year period, Walt created the templates for family television entertainment and outdoor family recreation while also infusing the promise of space exploration and urban planning with a sense of wonder and awe.

From the Lilly Belle, the scale-model locomotive that Walt helped build and install on a half-mile track around his home, to the visionary plans for EPCOT, the exhibits in this gallery present a vivid look at the landscape of Walt's imagination and achievements during the last 15 years of his life.


Gallery 10 Remembering Walt Disney
Walt Disney died on December 5, 1966. Reactions from around the world, in
newspaper articles, editorial comment, and letters and telegrams present an
appreciation of the joy, hope, and inspiration Walt provided to millions of people around the world.

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I have got to put a visit on my bucket list

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Paul

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

                        

Memberships are now available for those of us on the left coast.

The Walt Disney Family Museum

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Ed

My Disney Countdown

Counting down to: Trip to WDW
You should be on a Plane right now!