From ESF to Disney: It’s a Small World After All — Benjamin Boisclair ’15

Alumni Profile

From ESF to Disney: It’s a Small World After All — Benjamin Boisclair ’15

By Judy G. Myers, Contributing Writer

Ben Boisclair’s worldview was born of firsthand experience. It governs every aspect of his life, from his personal day-to-day to his professional duties as a landscape architect for Walt Disney Imagineering. It’s simple but profound: While culture makes us different, underneath we’re all the same.

He first glimpsed it during a semester abroad at ESF, and he continues to expand it today. “Through my travels, I’ve come to understand what it means to be human,” he said. “Exploring the world and meeting new people will one hundred percent change what you think about everything,” said Boisclair.

Boisclair’s worldview emerged from two discrete insights he gained overseas. The first came during an August-to-Christmas stint in Copenhagen with seven other ESF landscape architecture students. Boisclair was there to understand how the city’s design and infrastructure reflected the value Danes placed on sustainability.

To gain insight into the locals’ attitudes, Boisclair spoke with everyone he could, biking 20 miles a day to Copenhagen’s far-flung corners. One day he met a boat captain who maintained the offshore windmills circling the city. The captain invited Ben to join him on an expedition with a group of American energy experts. Climbing to the top of a windmill in the middle of the ocean, Boisclair learned that the houses overlooking the windmills along the shore were some of the most expensive in Copenhagen because the Danes treasured the windmills’ environmental benefits. It was the opposite in the U.S., where people viewed windmills as eyesores, said Boisclair. He remembers, “That expedition showed me in a visceral way that cultural values determine how people interact with their environment.”

Boisclair learned a very different lesson while traveling in the Middle East. After earning his B.A. in landscape architecture, he did business development and design for major firms like Sasaki and SWA in Los Angeles. While at SWA, he led a project called Dubai Creek Harbor, a large island waterfront development on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Every other week he would travel to the Middle East, where he studied regional landscapes, social norms, and how people interacted with the spaces around them.

“Spending so much time there remade my perception of the Middle East,” he said. “The people there are the nicest in the world. They think completely different from us, but I understood that in the end, we’re all the same. We’re all just people. That’s what I learned there, and that’s what I apply to my design.”

That conviction prepared him well for a call that would move him from SWA and Sasaki to Disney.

Boisclair had worked for Disney earlier, as an intern. At ESF, he’d worked on the Annual Fund calling drive, and one of the alumni on his list was an original designer for Disney’s Animal Kingdom. At the alum’s urging, Boisclair had applied for an internship at Disney, where he’d fallen in love with the company and the West Coast.

A decade later, Disney heard that Boisclair was in LA opening a west coast presence for Sasaki as a professional designer with international experience, and they wanted to know if he’d be interested in coming back to work for them as a landscape architect.

Boisclair was thrilled to accept. As a kid, he loved watching behind‑the‑scenes Disney shows and always imagined it would be an amazing place to work. Moreover, he was eager to flex his design muscles in a bigger way than he could at a traditional firm. “I came back to Disney because I wanted to do something that had a huge impact on individuals. You can do that in traditional urban design and planning, but there was something about Disney that tugged at me,” he said.

For Boisclair, Disneyland was a place where people left reality for something completely different. The possibility of using design to influence that mentality for millions of visitors, no matter who they were or where they came from, thrilled him.

As a landscape architect, Boisclair works in the Disney Imagineers department, whose slogan is “Making the Impossible Possible.” Disney describes Imagineers as visionaries who “constantly push the boundaries of technology and invent new goals ... by challenging our own assumptions and asking bold questions.” For Boisclair, that echoed his training at ESF: transforming things through new ways of thinking about them.

Throughout his first two years at Disney, Boisclair’s challenge was solving a bubble diagram of spatial relationships, function, and traffic flow that would enable him to design spaces that would spark visitors’ imaginations. “It was finding that lucky hybrid of inducing guests who wanted to get from A to B to stop and have fun and look at the little corner where there’s something that maybe they noticed but no one else did,” he said.

 

 

 

Then came a once-in-a-lifetime assignment: designing a new entryway for the original Disneyland Park. It requires him to create a universal Disney experience for guests of all ages and cultures. Though the task humbles him, he’s set his goals high: “I want our millions and millions of visitors to set aside their everyday lives and simply experience the joy and wonder of that magical moment when they anticipate something ahead but don’t fully know what it is.”

Boisclair can’t reveal the elements of his entryway design, but he said it involves color, shape, emotion, and materiality. “You’re going from the real world to Disney. How should that look? How should it make you feel?”  he said. At the same time, it’s a complex logistical web, designing for X number of people at Y time of day, with untold security constraints. How does he do that through design?  “Let me just say it’s easier said than done,” he laughed.

True to his academic roots, Boisclair is also heavily involved in Disney’s sustainability department, where he applies what he learned about the complexities of the environment at ESF.  “There I learned that understanding the various layers of the environment enables you to see how they affect other things,” he said. At Disney, that means thinking outside the box about how to reuse materials or completely invent new ones, challenging traditional conventions in a more evolutionary or sustainable way.

Boisclair believes Walt Disney got it right in 1963, when the movie mogul commissioned the song “It’s a Small World After All” for the company’s exhibit at the upcoming World’s Fair. The theme of the fair was “Peace through Understanding.” The Disney exhibit was a water ride through different “countries.” The song, which became a worldwide anthem, was written a short time after the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the lyric “there’s so much that we share / that it’s time we’re aware / it’s a small world after all.”

Boisclair appreciates the meaning of the song, as well as the company that commissioned it, and he hopes that others will, too. “We all grow up in siloed bubbles, where we learn from our parents, our teachers. The best thing we can do is grow that bubble,” he said. “Travel. Understand the world. Understand that we’re all just people and we all live on the same little earth. If everyone did that, our small world would become a much better place.”

 

 

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