Piston Peak's 19 Foot Model Headlines Four Walt Disney World Lands at Imagineering's D23 Pavilion

By entgrove · August 14, 2026 · Updated September 29, 2026

Walt Disney Imagineering built its largest D23 pavilion yet, and five Walt Disney World projects have their own displays inside it. Imagineering: Horizons puts a 19 by 19 foot Piston Peak model carrying the first look at the land's second attraction, Encanto Audio-Animatronics figures and a scene model from Tropical Americas, Monstropolis critter maquettes, the first physical pieces of the Villains land and a Carousel of Progress gallery with the Rover animatronic in one room. No opening dates were given, and a Disney Believe display teases cruise announcements coming Sunday.

Walt Disney Imagineering built its largest D23 pavilion yet this year at the Anaheim Convention Center, and a sizable share of the floor belongs to Walt Disney World. Five Florida projects have their own displays inside Imagineering: Horizons, including a 19 by 19 foot Piston Peak National Park model, Encanto Audio-Animatronics figures from Tropical Americas, painted critter maquettes from Monstropolis and the first physical pieces of the Villains land. A Carousel of Progress gallery rounds it out with two new costumes, the Rover animatronic and an attraction poster drawn in the style of the 1975 original.

How the pavilion is laid out

Guests walk in through the Promenade of Progress, a corridor lined with facades covered in concept art from projects currently under construction across Disney Experiences. Imagineers designed the space as a continuation of the Horizons Showcase they staged at D23 in 2024, this time framed around construction actually underway. In the walkthrough video Disney released ahead of the event, the Imagineer hosting the tour puts it plainly: "This year, our whole story is a story of progress, a story about forward motion, and about all the work that's happening around the globe." The entrance marquee nods to the 1964 Progressland original, and the mid-century design language carries through the whole space. The centerpiece is Center Stage, which hosts more than 30 Imagineer presentations over the course of the weekend. Its design copies the 1967 Tomorrowland Terrace stage, which Imagineering has renamed the Tom Morrow-land Terrace Stage for the occasion, and Tom Morrow 2.0, host of Imagineer That! on the Walt Disney Imagineering YouTube channel, turns up there during the event.

Past the promenade, the floor is broken into project bays holding models, maquettes, concept art and interactive displays. Every resort in the portfolio is given a place on the floor, which is why the pavilion runs so large, but the Walt Disney World bays carry the most new material for Florida guests. More than 150 Imagineers are working the space across the event.

Carousel of Progress gets its own gallery

The Magic Kingdom classic is one of the five Walt Disney World projects Imagineering lists as in development, and its bay leans on physical artifacts rather than renderings. The display is split between wings labelled Act I and Act IV, the show's 1900s opening and its present-day closing scene, each hung with framed scene photography. Two new costumes from the updated show are out, the father's costume rooted in the 1960s scene and the mother's costume from the future scene, both in yellow. The Rover animatronic from the classic Walt Disney World show stands between them, displayed beneath a new attraction poster Imagineering produced in the style of the 1960s original, with the "from the good old days to the possible future" line under the title and a Tomorrowland banner across the bottom. Two maquettes sit on plinths at either end, lit 1:2 scale miniatures of acts one and four built as homages to the models made for the original show, at the same scale as those seen on Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Disney.

The attraction has been running in Tomorrowland since 1975, after debuting at the 1964 New York World's Fair and spending several years at Disneyland. It is the rare Magic Kingdom show that gets more attention the longer it stays open, and a display of this size at a fan event is a reasonable signal that Imagineering is not treating it as a museum piece.

Tropical Americas brings the Encanto figures out

The Animal Kingdom land replacing DinoLand U.S.A. has the most finished-looking display of the Florida group. An Encanto Attraction sign hangs over the bay, and guests get a look inside the ride, including Audio-Animatronics figures that appear in one of its scenes. Two of the animated figures on display are headed straight into the attraction once the event wraps. A half inch scale model of one of the ride's scenes and maquettes of its ride vehicles round out the preview. A large donkey figure loaded with crates stands at one end of the room, with a monitor nearby playing attraction artwork. A model of the temple facade for the Indiana Jones attraction, going in alongside Encanto, sits on its own plinth; Imagineering flew it in from the Florida job site, where it guides art direction in the field. Four more sculpts, each on a plinth of its own, show off the character friends riding the carousel planned for the land, a large bird standing over the smaller animals.

A 19 foot Piston Peak model, and the second attraction

The Piston Peak National Park model fills the largest room in the pavilion at 19 by 19 feet, and it carries the reveal fans have been waiting on: a first look at the land's second attraction. The model runs from a lodge village under a snow capped peak, pine forest filling the ground between the buildings and footpaths, out to a rockwork geyser basin at the far end with a ride path threading through the rocks. A national park style poster hangs above it, stamped with a park seal dated 1872 and the line "The Wheelderness Calls." The room hides smaller touches too, from a frog shaped like a car to backgrounds inspired by Disney artist Eyvind Earle, and the clay dimensional sketches of the land's guardian trees traveled from Florida in a refrigerated truck so they would not melt on the way. Guests who visit the space get a themed postcard to take home. The Cars themed area is under construction in Frontierland at Magic Kingdom, in the expansion ground beyond Big Thunder Mountain, and until now the public view of it has been concept art and construction walls. A land marquee display featuring a Goat Cart is set up nearby as a photo op.

Monstropolis puts its monster-fied critters on plinths

The Monsters, Inc. land coming to Disney's Hollywood Studios sits under a lit Monstropolis marquee, and its wall carries a board titled Building the Neighborhoods of Monstropolis: sketches, design renderings and photographs of sculpting work in progress, assembled by the artists currently art directing the project in the field to lay out the design inspiration behind the city's neighborhoods. The more quotable pieces are the painted maquettes of its wildlife: a monster-fied pigeon, squirrel and rabbit, each given the extra eyes and horns treatment. The pigeon has two heads, and the concept sketch for the squirrel is framed on the wall above them.

The Villains land shows its first physical pieces

The Villains land announced for Magic Kingdom has the smallest footprint in the pavilion, but it is the first time any of it has existed as an object rather than a rendering. Two themed tree sculpts are all Imagineering brought, one from the land's happy forest and one from its spookier side, standing in for the atmosphere and visual language being developed for the area rather than a layout or an attraction reveal. That is a thin showing on paper and a meaningful one in practice, since the land has had almost nothing shown publicly since it was announced.

Star Wars takes over the R&D lab

The Research and Development corner is Star Wars themed this year, and the two displays that once sat on the floor without context now have one. Guests can talk with the droid-fixing Anzellans of the Anzellan Creature Workshop, an interactive activation, and watch Hugo's Sweets and Fizz, a new food pod animatronic show in which Hugo pours cold drinks from the same style of cart seen in The Mandalorian and Grogu. The area also pulls back the curtain on how the new Millennium Falcon mission for Smugglers Run came together.

A cruise tease, and the rest of the pavilion floor

Disney Cruise Line fans have a reason to watch the weekend too: the pavilion includes a display for the Disney Believe that teases announcements Imagineers say they will share on Sunday, the event's final day.

The rest of the space covers projects at Disney's other resorts. The first exterior model ever shown of the Avengers Pavilion represents the new Hong Kong Disneyland attraction, and Shanghai street artists painted a custom Spider-Man mural on one wall with a time-lapse of its creation playing nearby. Disney California Adventure is represented by the Avengers Campus expansion model and a Stark Flight Lab ride vehicle maquette, plus a queue rendering and a Hector sculpt for the Coco attraction, where guests can write a Disneyland memory on a card that gets turned into soil for the planters at the attraction queue. Also on display: rockwork and ride vehicle models for the Avatar destination, progress on Tokyo Disneyland's Wreck-It Ralph attraction, which expands the Sugar Rush world with 12 original confectionary characters created with Walt Disney Animation Studios, Tokyo's new Space Mountain design model with a ride vehicle maquette and a scale model of the plaza icon, and a black light study model of the Lion King attraction under construction at Disney Adventure World in Paris, shown with its own ride vehicle maquette and a scale model of Rafiki's Tree, all straight from the Glendale model shop.

What this means for Walt Disney World guests

Four Walt Disney World lands are being built at once, and until this weekend none of them had been shown as physical models the public could walk around. Piston Peak and the Villains land are rising in the Frontierland expansion ground beyond Big Thunder Mountain at Magic Kingdom, Tropical Americas is replacing DinoLand U.S.A. at Animal Kingdom, and Monstropolis is planned for Disney's Hollywood Studios, so the layouts on these tables are the clearest read yet on how the finished areas will fit together. Several of the pieces are working production tools rather than display props: the Encanto figures ship from the convention floor into the attraction, and the Indiana Jones temple facade goes back to guiding art direction in Florida, which says the Animal Kingdom project in particular is deep into physical production.

Imagineering did not attach an opening date to any of the five projects, so nobody is leaving the pavilion with a calendar. What the displays give instead is a rough order of progress. Piston Peak has a finished land model and a second attraction to point at, Tropical Americas has figures built, a scene modelled and a temple facade in hand, Monstropolis is still sketching its neighborhoods, and the Villains land has two trees. For anyone watching the construction walls at Magic Kingdom, Disney's Animal Kingdom and Disney's Hollywood Studios, that ordering is the useful part. Anyone not in the room can follow the reveals through Walt Disney Imagineering's own Instagram and YouTube channels, where the pavilion tour video above is already live and the presentations from Center Stage tend to surface after the event.