.jpg)
A step up: The Washington State Convention
Center’s $1.7 billion expansion will add more than 400,000 square feet of space. (LMN)
For years, the people who fill convention centers have been changing much more rapidly than the convention centers themselves, said Todd Voth, who leads the convention center practice for architect Populous. Decades ago, a basic formula for convention center design was established, he said, and that formula has been slow to lose its hold on the industry ever since. In recent years, however, Voth and other venue experts have seen more creative thinking in convention center design and operation.
The buildings are becoming more flexible and dynamic, making them better suited for a specialized, more informal clientele that favors small groups, personal interactions and technology-based solutions. Convention centers also are becoming more attached to their neighborhoods and communities after years of seeming to exist as something apart, residing in their own space somehow separate from their surroundings.
“We’re starting to see different models for convention centers that are more focused on the customers as human beings,” Voth said. “A lot of the trends we’re seeing are in line with that. We’re seeing more natural light, more views, more varieties of spaces. It’s taken a while for people to step onto the diving board and take a little risk, but it’s happening.”
Flexible, varied spaces
Tom Hazinski, managing director for convention, sports and entertainment at HVS Design, said the way information is exchanged among meeting attendees in convention centers has changed dramatically, and facility operators are still striving to provide spaces that accommodate that change.
“It used to be (that) a typical setup for a meeting was to have a stage and have a set of presenters who would come out and communicate this information to a larger audience, and it was a kind of one-way street,” Hazinski said. “As most industries have become more specialized, the need for more breakout space has grown. There’s much more of an emphasis on a peer-to-peer exchange of information.”
Voth said designing a mix of meeting spaces in convention centers for visitors with different needs and preferences is a key piece of the design challenge for these venues.
“Our emerging customer is demanding more variety and more informal kinds of meeting opportunities,” Voth said. “We’re always working to create spaces that offer that variety.”
Hazinski said convention centers are opting for highly flexible large multipurpose spaces that can serve as an exhibition space or ballroom or multiple meeting rooms.
“These spaces aren’t always of quite as high a quality as dedicated spaces, but they do provide a tremendous amount of flexibility to a venue,” Hazinski said.
Voth said flexible is sometimes an inadequate description for the design work done to give users a variety of space options – he prefers transformable. For instance, the Anaheim (Calif.) Convention Center, designed by Populous, has a system of movable walls that allows the venue to reshape itself based on the needs of each client.
Rob Svedberg, principal in the convention center practice at Tvsdesign, said flexibility can be especially critical in smaller convention centers.
“They have to be a jack-of-all trades and host a Rotary lunch or a small, high-end meeting or an exhibition or wrestling or roller derby or whatever comes their way,” Svedberg said. “At that level, it’s just a different type of flexibility, because the range of events that they do is really astounding.”
Hazinski said convention centers also place an emphasis now on spaces that encourage impromptu social gatherings within larger meetings. In fact, Svedberg said, “informal casual spaces have become as important as more formal meeting spaces.”
“Sometimes there are as many people milling about, socializing and networking as there are sitting in classroom sessions, and those people need a place to go and sit where they can be in a group of two or three people rather than sitting with 150 other people,” Svedberg said. “There’s a need for these smaller-scale, more intimate spaces within these big venues.”
Technology is often a critical component in designing flexible spaces. Populous designed a “meeting room of the future” in the San Antonio Convention Center that employs technology, such as touchscreens, to create a highly interactive space. The space also can be divided in a variety of ways. Voth said meeting planners and attendees can prove to be extremely creative when a space allows them to be.
“I’ve seen dramatically different events in that space,” Voth said.
A neighborhood anchor
Michael Winters, principal and director of design and interiors at Fentress Architects, said connecting a convention center to its community as part of its brand “has become a fairly new trend in the industry.”
“Thirty years ago, a convention center was just a simple economic engine for a city,” Winters said. “It was seen as a way to bring clean money to the city, without much emphasis to its place or design. Convention centers became known as ‘boxes with docks,’ and design perspective was not important. Today, both the city and the users expect a significant civic piece of architecture that reflects a true sense of place and relates to the new destination that the visitor encounters as part of their convention experience.”
Public and private entities in most cities are invested in improving their urban centers, and convention centers are a useful asset in that effort. In Denver, for instance, Winters said “the city core expanded toward the convention center with billions of dollars of development” since it opened in 1990.
The convention centers themselves advocate for improvements in their surrounding neighborhoods because it can provide them with a competitive edge. The proximity of shops, restaurants, hotels, parks and other appealing features help fill out the convention experience. Acceptable meeting spaces, sufficient hotel rooms and a decent price are just the “threshold criteria” for meeting planners, Hazinski said.
“With everyone providing that, then the real competition comes with the ability for meeting planners to maximize their attendance at events,” Hazinski said. “And that means bringing people to an environment they want to be in.”
After all, the meetings are important, but “visitors want to get out and explore the city and have that authentic experience that can be a great part of going to a convention,” Voth said.
Populous served as an architect on the International Convention Centre Sydney that opened in 2016. The convention center has the favorable location of a site on the famously picturesque Darling Harbour. The location is a natural draw for visitors, but Voth said designers didn’t take that for granted. They designed the facility with spaces that encouraged visitors from neighborhoods and elsewhere, even including food venues that are open to the public.
Building an appealing connection to a city is not just about location and surrounding features – it’s also about the building itself. While on a convention center’s campus, visitors don’t want to feel like they could be just anywhere, Svedberg said. That means design features that incorporate the local region’s characteristics and personality, as well as local food choices and views that take advantage of the venue’s surroundings.
“They want a unique space and that’s happening at every scale of the building, where the building is telling a story about where you are,” Svedberg said.
Distinctive event spaces
As convention centers jockey for customers, Winters said he is seeing the creation of more special event spaces that can help differentiate a center from its competitors.
At the Miami Beach Convention Center, “we have a rooftop VIP ballroom with an outdoor terrace and a new six-acre outdoor park and event space,” Winters said. “In Denver, we are adding a new 50,000-square-foot outdoor events terrace with spectacular Rocky Mountain views. In San Diego, we developed a five-acre oceanfront rooftop terrace.”
Svedberg said distinctive, featured settings within a center often are outdoor breakout spaces. For instance, Tvsdesign has designed a one-acre outdoor farm on the roof of the Javits Center in New York City with an event pavilion and a large terrace for events.
“It’s about catering to the desire to create unique experiences,” Svedberg said. “Eye-catching features can really help distinguish one convention center from another.”
Svedberg said these spaces often are found at venues that are fully booked. The spaces are built to ensure that events grow and flourish — and bring meetings back the next year.
“Centers are using the spaces to delight their customers more and to provide additional places for event revenue,” Svedberg said.
Financing and the renovation boom
Winters said that the most common financing method for convention center projects continues to be increasing hotel occupancy taxes, though sales taxes and rental car taxes also are used.
Winters and Voth said they are seeing more P3 projects — public-private partnerships – in which a city and a private development group enter an agreement for the design, construction, financing and management of a facility, often with a hotel attached.
The convention center construction landscape remains heavily dependent on renovations and expansions with few new ground-up construction projects in the works in the United States, but even within those constraints experts see signs of innovation and progress.
“There’s been a real pent-up demand for projects, especially renovation projects that should have occurred 10 years ago that didn’t occur and are way overdue — carpets, painting, repurposing space, new technology — and that left a lot of convention centers well behind the market because the funding and political will weren’t there,” Svedberg said. “Those deferred projects are getting done now, and that’s helping the market catch up.”