Biography | Michael Eisner — The Graves Building the Lot Raised While He Ran Disney

People treat Disney headquarters as the 1920s animation sheds Walt built on Hyperion.

By 1990 the Burbank lot had a postmodern office Michael Graves designed for the company Eisner was running.

The Team Disney building stands at the corner of Buena Vista Street and Alameda Avenue. Seven dwarf caryatids hold up a pediment on the south face.

Eisner commissioned Graves during the same years the studio returned Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King to the box office.

The building is an office, not a sound stage. After Eisner left in 2005 the company put his name on it. Commons now files the block as the Michael D. Eisner Building.

That naming is a later frame. The 1990 fact is simpler: the chief executive who had arrived to a four-acre cluster of low buildings put a signature block on the same street.

The address remains 500 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank. The lot is still a working studio with a gated public face.

Do not read the dwarf columns as a ride. They are an office joke in limestone, visible from the sidewalk if the trees are cut back.

Photo: Team Disney building, Buena Vista Street, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Michael Eisner, October 2010, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.