LOST CONTINENT, ISLANDS OF ADVENTURE AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS FLORIDA

In July of 1996 Gruen Associates approached EEI to provide structural engineering services for the Lost Continent attraction at Universal`s Islands of Adventure in Florida. This complex included eight buildings:

Journey to Atlantis
Atlantis Area Shop
Mythos Restaurant
Sinbad Village
Sinbad Arena
Dueling Dragons Coaster Shop
Dueling Dragons Coasters
Fast Food Reastaurant

By far the most interesting of these structures was the Mythos Restaurant which had been designed entirely by a team of sculptors working in carving foam. The entire structure was to be covered inside and out with very complex plaster rockwork and was to appear to be a series of caves and grottos set into a rugged mountain landscape shot through with architectural ruin fragments, sculptural fragments of various sizes, and huge spheres embeded in the rock. Our unique task was to take this huge rambling sculpture and fit a rational steel structural system inside of it. This was accomplished by a process of digitizing the surface of the model (essentially electronically drawing lines on the model at regular intervals), breaking the model down into a series of 2-D planes, designing structural framing in these 2-D planes then reassembling them back into 3-D computer space to tie them together. Then do it over several times to refine it. The final contract documents for Lost Continent included hundreds of Plan, Elevation, and Detail drawings and our construction administration phase included having an EEI engineer on-site in Florida for nearly a year.