Unconventional Design: Big Names in a Small World

By Heidi Genoist -- Tradeshow Week, 10/18/2004

Think convention centers are only designed by faceless firms that specialize in institutional architecture? Think again.

By and large, convention centers projects don't attract the attention of world-famous designers. But big-name architects have been dipping their toes in the pool of public facility design for at least seven decades, and their interest in taking the plunge is on the rise.

The field of convention center design is dominated by large architecture/engineering/urban planning firms like Atlanta's Thompson Ventulett Stainback & Associates (designers of Chicago's McCormick Place South and Atlanta's George World Congress Center, among others). Often specialists in arenas, stadiums and other public-use facilities, these groups understand the particular requirements of big buildings that hold masses of people coming together for specific purposes.

But the big design-build firms don't simply churn out cookie-cutter designs — as architecture's prima donnas have at times suggested. This fall, a consortium of architects led by St. Louis-based Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum competed with a team led by Walt Disney Concert Hall designer Frank Gehry for the contract to design the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo. Observers of the local vs. national contest told Kansas City newspapers that the contract should go to Gehry if the city didn't want an arena that looked like every other one in the country.

Gehry's subsequent loss of the contract to HOK may be evidence that the big-box makers also know a thing or two about innovative design. For example, LMN Architects, a facility design firm based in Seattle, won a fistful of 2003 American Institute of Architects awards with its design of the Washington State Convention & Trade Center expansion.

As Gehry's interest in the Kansas City arena suggests, the profile of convention center design is on the rise. But this has as much to do with the clients as the architects themselves, noted Donald I. Grinberg, principal architect and director of convention center architecture at Boston-based HNTB.

"I don't think it's a change of talent; it's a change of intent," said Grinberg. "The days of doing windowless concrete boxes are over."

In other words, with cities showing more of an interest in good design, good designers are showing more of an interest in city-funded buildings.

Cesar Pelli earlier this year won the contract to design a new arena in downtown Tulsa, Okla., as well as renovate the adjacent convention center. Pelli's Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are the tallest skyscrapers in the world at 1,483 feet high. Before completing that project in 1998, Pelli had already won an AIA gold medal and headed the school of architecture at Yale University for seven years.

"Cesar Pelli comes to Tulsa not only with exemplary design experience, but he also understands the vision we have for Tulsa," John Scott, director of the Tulsa Convention Center, said at the time of Pelli's selection. "The new arena and renovated convention center will have a fantastic impact on our city and will provide many opportunities for Tulsa."

Architect Rafael Vinoly has worked on two recently opened venues: the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh; and the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, which he designed in a 50-50 joint venture with HNTB.

Founder of the Estudio de Arquitectura, the native Uruguayan moved to the United States in 1977 and the following year made New York City his home. Best known for the Tokyo Intl. Forum and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Vinoly's philosophy hinges on the idea that architects have a duty to elevate public spaces.

But Grinberg pointed out that these recent examples of convention center design enticing architectural superstars are not isolated. "Arthur Erickson designed the original San Diego Convention Center in the early '80s," he said.

A Vancouver native, Erickson has earned a reputation as one of Canada's greatest architects, with projects like the Fire Island House in New York and the Waterfall Building in his home city.

Frank Lloyd Wright — creator of such world-famous buildings as New York's Guggenheim Museum and father of the prairie house design — first imagined a civic center for Madison, Wis., in 1938. His original plan, including everything from a jail to a railroad station, never came to fruition. But the exterior design he revised many times and finally signed off on in 1958 was kept mostly intact.

Yet it was not until 1992, 33 years after the architect's death, that voters approved a referendum to build the Monona Terrace Convention Center. Wright's apprentice Tony Puttnam designed the existing interior with exhibition and meeting space.

Perhaps the most famous of the country's famously designed convention centers is the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York. The man behind the 22 acres of glass-encased tubular steel structures, completed in 1986, is I.M. Pei, who has since designed the Pyramide du Louvre in Paris and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

Born in Canton, China, in 1917, Ieoh Ming Pei left China at the age of 18 to study architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Pei won an AIA Gold medal in 1979.

Pei's less famous colleague at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, James Ingo Freed, designed the 1993 expansion of the Los Angeles Convention Center — yet another example of outside-the-cement-box-architecture.