Alumni Profile - Matt Tager ’83
Life in Fantasyland
Some Design + Environmental Analysis (DEA) graduates from the College of Human Ecology design spaces that make people feel reinvigorated — coffee shops, for instance. Others aspire to make people feel comfortable — surrounded by new information.
Matt Tager ’83, a principal interior designer on the Walt Disney Imagineering team that launched Shanghai Disneyland park in June 2016, is delighted if his spaces simply make people happy. This is not so simple, as it turns out, especially when you’re creating a multi-billion dollar resort, Disney’s first in mainland China, in a challenging business environment.
Tager’s role as lead interior designer was just a part of the Fantasyland team for the 963-acre park, which kept him in Shanghai for “three years, nine months — enough to get another undergraduate degree,” he muses on the way to work in Burbank.
Walt Disney Imagineering is the division of The Walt Disney Company that designs and builds all of Disney’s theme parks, attractions, hotels, cruise ships, and resort businesses. One of the things
that drew Tager to Imagineering, he says, was the opportunity to work “as part of a large, multi-disciplinary team of artists and technical experts in a variety of fields to bring immersive stories to life.”
For Tager, the most challenging part of the Shanghai project was not imagining things that never existed before — he’s demonstrably good at that. Rather, it was working with a Chinese construction industry that’s more accustomed to erecting skyscrapers than theme park castles.
Nevertheless, he says, “We worked with our Chinese general contractor to help them better understand what our expectations were for this complex project.”
They could have built a Disney replica park, cookie-cutter style, but the American company and its Chinese partner (the state-run Shanghai Shendi Group) wanted something special, Tager recalls. He
cites Disney CEO Bob Iger’s promise, “authentically Disney, distinctively Chinese,” and he thinks they’ve made that happen. “We wanted to bring Disney stories to life in a way that was relatable to our Chinese guests.”
Equally gratifying to Tager is the social-media feedback, gleaning praise-filled reviews and realizing, “I was part of that!”
He didn’t always have such a wide-ranging dream job. For years, Tager’s assignment was interiors for a regional chain of coffee shops (Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf), trying to make people feel better about their steamy brews. He’s done his share of freelancing and worked for Disney Imagineering on several projects, including Disney California Adventure and Tokyo DisneySea theme parks.
Once upon a dream he actually tried to make people feel smarter. That was a junior year project at Cornell, figuring out an interior for an unreconstructed Mann Library that was showing its age in the 1980s. Tager had transferred from SUNY Binghamton as a sophomore, drawn to DEA for its emphasis on reality-based projects — “something on campus or something in the community.”
Old Mann Libe, as it came to be called when the rejuvenation finally began in 2003, was as real as it gets for a DEA student in search of a design project.
Tager knew the formidable, Art Deco-demic exterior was untouchable by a young interiors type. Inside, he was charmed by the period details — like the generous stairways with their sleek, metal railings— and he came to cherish the green marble columns at Mann’s main entrance to the Ag Quad.
“It was one of the most interesting and rewarding school projects I’ve ever worked on,” Tager says now of his Mann Library proposals. “I wanted, basically to bust out the whole back of the building and open up a view of the woods.”
Imagine Tager’s surprise, returning a few years ago for reunion. He headed for Mann Library, which had reopened in 2007. Almost as if his thesis project had come true, there was that mind-stimulating view of the woods, from floor after airy floor of study space. The Art Deco handrails, carved stone detailing and green marble columns were still intact, too.