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As a global leader in urban convention center design, we know that show organizers, event attendees, and exhibitors want to feel connected to the city they’re visiting. Choreographing a vibrant neighborhood district around meeting and convention spaces ensure these venues work for event customers and the residents of the city. These venues should be part of the communities they’re in, serving visitors and locals alike.
Look towards a mixed-use model 
An active convention center district surrounded by hotels, attractions, retail and residential buildings creates a walkable environment that’s attractive to visit and live. It also creates a sense of place and identity that can help revitalize an urban area. For visitors, the ability to walk to the hotel and refresh after a long day at a conference, grab a quick bite at a restaurant with a local flavor or stop by a nearby shop for a gift before heading home means not only a richer experience, but money getting pumped into the local economy.
For locals it can mean more permanent jobs and a lively neighborhood fabric with walking distance amenities. When people’s work, entertainment and housing is in the same area, they’re more likely to be engaged in their community, often leading to a stronger sense of identity and a more sustainable lifestyle. The attendees of a convention should add to the excitement of a district. A convention’s presence shouldn’t be the only thing there. The ricochet effect of sporadic activity in these areas can be felt, for example, in restaurants surrounding a convention center. If there’s not consistent residential life in the area where these restaurants are being patroned frequently, a ramp-up and ramp-down effect occurs around events. This can lead to service that can’t keep pace with swells of activity and an overall mediocre experience for anyone visiting.  
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To make investments in large-scale convention projects worthwhile, the streetscape must be designed for an economically viable, vibrant and active district. We look towards projects like Nashville’s <a href="https://www.nashvillemusiccitycenter.com/">Music City Center</a> when highlighting the ways that street activity can be curated. The project goal activated all sides of the building. We worked to identify ideal locations for several types of leasable spaces (restaurants, convenience, retail and community spaces.) These spaces were programmed, independently metered and fit out after substantial completion by various vendors. All original uses have been successful and are still in operation.  
Addressing urban silos 
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That said, we often see that convention centers end up becoming fortresses rather than connective tissue in the community. Because these facilities need hundreds of thousands of square feet, many were initially built on an edge – on previously underdeveloped land along railroad tracks or in a floodplain. A lot of them, especially buildings in urban renewal eras are also used like highways, splitting neighborhoods off from one another and in to separate ‘cities’ of sorts.  
The recent master planning work we completed for the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center District in Dallas is an example where the existing building separates Downtown from The Cedars, a community on the rise. We’ve reimagined how this entire part of Dallas will function – rather than simply fixing the convention center on its existing site, with the building effectively being rotated into an entirely new facility. The existing site will become a new mixed-use district, bringing energy and excitement to the city of Dallas. This renovation project has as much to do with reinventing the city as it does with what it’ll mean for the event business. 
It&#8217;s all about the views 
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A major issue facing many older facilities is the events existing in a vacuum, where attendees go into windowless exhibit halls for the day, emerging without connection to any surrounding activity. Connecting to the activity around a convention center often includes opening up a view, part of an ongoing trend of adding terraces and other open-air spaces.  
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This is the case in Denver, where the Colorado Convention Center expansion is currently underway. We’re adding an 80,000 square-foot flex hall and roughly 20,000 square-feet of outdoor terrace space with a stellar view of the Rocky Mountains, which reinforces the facility’s destination story. The expansion adds needed event space while giving the client a space that’s truly reflective of their location.  
Outdoor event space was a design goal in Las Vegas with the recently completed <a href="https://tvsdesigndev.wpengine.com/projects/project-detail/1530/">West Hall Expansion</a>. 25,000 square-feet of outdoor event terrace space was added to the facility under the shade of the circulation ribbon of the roof, bringing unmatched views of the Vegas Strip and neighboring mountains. The terrace and enormous windows direct connection to the pulse of the city around them reinforces this Vegas destination story by offering event goers a unique local experience.  
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The most successful urban convention centers are designed to be much more than just meeting spaces. They are catalysts for economic development and community revitalization. Our approach to urban design often takes a big building and breaks the scale down to repair the street grid, integrating the center into the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood. This provides engaging moments throughout the district to best serve both locals and visitors in an inclusive, sustainable, bustling and vital public gathering place. In doing so, convention centers can stand out as destinations in their own right for generations to come.

Choreographing a City: Reinventing Urban Convention Center Districts

The Folded Form: Inspiring Design Through Paper Folding

<h3>PROJECT AIMS TO RE-INVENT DOWNTOWN EXPERIENCE</h3>
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<h4>MASTER PLANNER: Rob Svedberg is principal at Atlanta-based TVS.</h4>
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By: <a href="https://venuesnow.com/shift-of-conventional-wisdom-in-dallas/">James Zoltak of Venues Now</a>
Master planning is complete on the $3 billion Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center renovation project in Dallas.
“That’s been approved and they’ve gone out for procurement on project manager,” said Rob Svedberg, principal with TVS. “To me it’s one of the more exciting projects in the industry right now.”
Svedberg said the project “has as much to do with reinventing the city as it does with what it will mean for the event business.”
“A lot of these buildings were built on edge-land that was along railroad tracks or in a floodplain because they need a lot of space,” he said. “A lot of them, especially buildings in the kind of urban renewal eras, were also used like highways were, to split neighborhoods off from any other and to kind of separate cities a little bit and Dallas is an example where the building kind of separated downtown from a really what is now a vibrant part of the city.
The architecture firm worked with the city to “re-envision how that whole part of the town would work,” Svedberg said.
“Instead of just fixing it on its existing site, we basically rotated the building, doing a whole new facility, and the land where the existing building is then becomes a new mixed-use district,” he said. “So, instead of blocking one neighborhood from another, it will link them all together.”
Having a vibrant neighborhood district around a convention and meeting space is as important as having a good hotel package, Svedberg said.
“You have to do a lot of things right when you do these buildings,” he said. “You have to make them work for the customers of the event, but that’s not enough.”
Event attendees and vendors like to feel connected to the city they’re in and that’s led to an ongoing trend of adding terraces and other open-air spaces, ideally with a view, according to Svedberg.
“They want to feel what it’s like to live in Dallas or Atlanta or somewhere, he said.
The project, which goes out for design procurement later this year, will expand the amount of meeting rooms and ballrooms while holding exhibit space roughly steady, “but they completely re-envisioned the environment and it will be one of those things that sets them apart as a destination for generations,” Svedberg said.
For example, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, which is practically connected to the current convention center becomes a standalone facility and gets renovated. The original Dallas Arena will be reconverted into a standalone venue and preserved.
“City Hall is right there, but there’s also Pioneer Park and the stampede sculpture that’s a big draw in the city and then on the other side of the highway there’s the incredible warehouse district where Gillie’s is and there’s a good amount of night life and residential together,” Svedberg said.
Connecting to the activity around a convention center often includes opening up a view. That’s the case in Denver, where tvs is in a design-build project with with Hensel Phelps Construction.
The approximately $212 million projects adds an 80,000-square-foot flexible-use hall and a roughly 20,000-square-foot outdoor terrace with a view of the Rocky Mountains.
“That one was baked before we got there, so we didn’t help on the programming side, but it’s a very interesting project in that you’ve got a convention center in Denver that if you would get to the roof has spectacular views of the Rocky Mountains, which reinforces their whole destination story and you couldn’t really see the mountains from inside the building,” Svedberg said.
The expansion adds needed event space while giving the client a “brand-centric, on-brand event space.
“If the building was being designed now versus when it was done it would have taken advantage of that,” he said.
Other convention center projects in the TVS portfolio include the roughly $400 million renovation of the Wisconsin Center, which will host the 2024 Republican National Convention.
The building had a steel topping-out ceremony on May 10.
“It’s well along,” Svedberg said describing the expansion of an elevated exhibit hall that’s being with new meeting rooms and parking underneath, a new rooftop ballroom with a terrace and views to the Milwaukee River.
“I’m not sure you’re going to see the lake from up there but taking advantage of that incredible (Deer District) destination they’ve created there with Fiserv Center and all the activity that’s happening,” he said.
Tvs also designed the expansion that roughly doubles the size of the Savannah Convention Center a project that involves construction of a 100,000-square-foot exhibit hall with a 50,000 or 60,000-square-foot ballroom on top of it (with) an outdoor terrace
“Similar to Milwaukee, that is a story of a successful market needing to grow,” Svedberg said. “The events are different and in the case of Milwaukee they have a really good hotel package so they can support more space. In the case of Savannah they’re going to need to do a hotel with the expansion.”
In Cleveland tvs is working on the conversion of the 10-year-old Medical Mart, also known as the Global Center for Health Innovation, into into meeting space.
“We were the design architects on that and then there’s a design builder now that’s going to execute that project,” Svedberg said.
The company is doing a small project down in Bradenton, Florida, at small center that’s trying to add some ballroom and meeting spaces.
“They’re connecting it to a new hotel they’re building,” Svedberg said.
The company is about to kick of the design of a $200 million renovation of the Cincinnati Convention Center, for which tvs completed a master plan.
“They have a new hotel development deal they’re doing and they have a great package,” Svedberg said. “It’s a great town that’s geographically central. They have a good meeting room and banquet package but it’s a tired building and it just needs love from the guest experience point of view.”
The space around the convention center outshines the experience available to event attendees and exhibitors.
“Getting to spend the money where the people are is always fun,” Svedberg said. “With that and the new hotel, I think they’ll have a really strong package.”
<a href="https://tvsdesigndev.wpengine.com/projects/convention-centers/">Current or recent projects in TVS portfolio</a>:
<h4>ACTIVE EXPANSION PROJECTS</h4>
Ft Worth – $701 million
Milwaukee – $456 million
Savannah  – $276 million
Denver – $233 million
Cleveland  – $49 million
Bradenton – $42 million
<h4>DENVER CONVENTION CENTER</h4>
213,000 sf expansion (1.8M sf existing)
80,000 sf column free multipurpose room
Outdoor rooftop terrace
150,000 sf meeting space
600,000 sf exhibit space
5,000 seat Bellco Theatre
Projected opening date – Late 2023
Entire expansion sits above the existing Exhibit Hall, requiring 90’ long x 10’ deep trusses in all directions to support the new floor
At 80,000 sf, the expansion project’s new ballroom will be the largest in Colorado.
Brings the outside in with spectacular views of the Rocky Mountains
<h4>SAVANNAH CONVENTION CENTER</h4>
365,000 sf expansion (330,000 sf existing)
100,000 sf of exhibit hall space
42,000 sf ballroom
23,000 sf meeting rooms (14 total)
“Integrated glass” hanger door
950-space parking garage with multiple covered entrances to the building
Additional F&amp;B areas
Projected opening date – Late 2023
Design highlights include stunning glass entry/drop-off area, grand curtainwall facade entry on the north, ballroom with views of Talmadge Memorial Bridge, and two rooftop terraces with views to the city and of Hutchinson Island
<h4>WISCONSIN CENTER</h4>
112,000 sf expansion (188,000 sf existing)
112,000 sf expo hall to create 300,000 contiguous sf of expo hall
30,000 sf ballroom
24 meeting rooms
Employee locker rooms, break, training and briefing rooms
Gender-neutral bathrooms
Quiet rooms and nursing mother’s rooms
Outdoor patio spaces
Visit Milwaukee Visitor Center
Six loading docks
400 parking spaces
Sophisiticated WiFi and IT infrastructure
Broke ground in Oct 2021. Projected opening date – Early 2024
Doubles existing size including the addition of rooftop ballroom and outdoor terraces, expo space and flexible meeting rooms
Design incorporates glass facades that provide ample natural light, a unique monumental freshwater display installation, high-tech AV offerings, operational efficiencies and best-in-class health and safety mitigation contingencies

Venues Now: SHIFT OF CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IN DALLAS

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As I crest the ninth drop of 12 on the Coney Island Cyclone ride of this life, I’m looking for a career change. Something less office centric and more of a hedge on salvation than rubbing up against contractors in Las Vegas – so I’m going for sainthood. I’d be lying if I said this sainthood path was an easy road to hoe, not that anyone does that anymore. And I also think being all dodgy with truth might be a deal killer.
For sure there have been “errors of judgement” during the ride so far, fueled by 41,062 martinis to date ($615,937.00 which could have been delivered to the doorstep of charity.) I’m also confrontational, more like quick to pounce on any soft openings in the character of others. I’m also a huge fan of weaponizing humor to demean others for the entertainment of my own insecurities.
I think I’m a scream.
One of my other charming attributes is forgetting to count to 10 before something truly regrettable escapes my lips.
Little mother, one of God’s angels and soprano in the church choir, would say- “Kevin Dwight. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
I know I’ve got some work to, so I’ve been doing some homework on the Sainthood and penance thing. I’m at least good at that – I was class valedictorian for God’s sake. On the debit side of the ledger, I know I check the box on all the seven capital vices or cardinal sins of Christian theology. You know the wayworn list – pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth (I’ve highlighted the biggies in bold italic.) Sloth is pretty minor on the sins of Kevin list. I’m a workaholic overachiever, but I do love to nap all Sunday. As for lust, no one can duck that one, even Jimmy Carter.
Atonement for seven categories of capital vices seems like a lot for someone like me far along the actuarial curve, so Buddhism’s focus on austerity, asceticism and spiritual and physical whittles it down to four at least – that’s like nine years off a life sentence for me. Take that, and the highly convenient system of “indulgences” or paid “get out of jail cards” ramped up by Pope Urban II, and I think I’ve got the road hoed. For the uninitiated, or anyone who skipped the Bad Ideas in Western History class in college, indulgences were a cash for contrition scheme formulated by the Vatican to fund the crusades and the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica.
I wish I knew the Latin equivalent of “eureka!”
As I’ve confessed, (that’s important for penance) I’m a sinner sevenfold, with extra mileage in the P, W, E and L categories. However, there now seems to be an eighth capital sin (like I needed it to get worse) – Selfishness. Particularly Carbon Selfishness. There’s an “End of Times” quality to this new sin, akin to the fire and brimstone prophesies, but certainly more grounded in science than fear mongering.
This love of “thermodynamic whoopee” (thanks Mr. Vonnegut, wherever you are, for boiling down the fossil fuel age to two memorable words) runs deep in the Gordon gene pool. Four-foot eleven Aunt Bernie, my favorite person in the amusement park so far, once drove from Pittsburgh to New York’s Time Square and back in one day because she was bored. She said her feet were running in her shoes.
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The new sin, number eight, of thermodynamic whoopee, is a biggie for me, far outpacing the martini consumption – so I’ll have to break it down by acts.
The sin of Flying 
A few months ago, on a flight back from Dallas, a flight attendant handed me a note. My first thought was, “ok – who died now?” Turns out that somewhere over Louisiana I’d passed through the three-million-mile mark on Delta. And that’s just Delta. Add in about 600,000 on American and 120,000 on Qantas and you get a lot of damage – mostly while drinking vodka in first class.
It gets worse. In my addiction to thermodynamic propulsion, I own an airplane – got my license on my 16th birthday along with my driver’s license. Put another 70,000 on the pile.
3,790,000 airmiles. That’s a lot of whoopee – and about 1,895,000 pounds of carbon.
Way to go Sunshine.
The sin of driving 
I am my beloved Aunt Bernie’s nephew. We Gordons were born to drive. Most always a convertible. Always a stick shift. Right now, there are three thermodynamic propulsion vehicles in the driveway – for the one still ambulatory person. Even when I lived in New York, the most pedestrian of all American cities, I usually kept two cars in very expensive garages. One of those is an MG I bought new in 1974. It’s still a daily driver.
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Anyway, at an average of over 18,000 miles a year, my personal odometer has ticked over the 940,000-mile mark. Add another 434,000 lbs. of carbon to the communal air.
Way to go Buckaroo Banzai.
The sin of Architecture 
My undergraduate degree in architecture in the early 1970s was surreptitiously called a Bachelor of Environmental Design.” It was the Earth Day era, and I wore Earth shoes to class. Looked like I had a platypus crawling out of each pant leg.
Anyway, that label was a sugar coating on a very bitter pill. Turns out that what I do for a living is the worst thing going for the planet – by far. According to the AIA, who are now accounting for our profession’s sins, buildings generate more than 40% of global CO2 emissions.
While racking up all those airmiles, I’ve been designing significant projects from Paris to Memphis –  Toronto to Melbourne – Dubai to Detroit totaling 18,210,000 square feet of new construction.
Pride.
It gets better, or worse. It turns out that sometimes it’s a sin to think about sinning – lust, or coveting, is a good example. In addition to more than 18 million square feet of built work, I’ve got another 32,500,000 square feet of unrealized projects on my resume.
Taken together, that’s a whopping 50,710,000 square feet of concrete, steel and drywall that just doesn’t grow out of the soil on its own after a good rain.
At about 45 pounds of carbon per square foot, add another 2,281,950,000 lbs. of atmospheric chokehold.
I’ve clearly outdone myself.
Time to open up the wallet for some indulgences.
Lucky for me, I’ve got a mentor in the environmental payback racket. He doesn’t know it, since he’s been dead for 178 years. Every school kid in my hometown of Mount Vernon, Ohio was taught lessons in personal self-sacrifice and asceticism (there’s that Buddhist construct again) from our third most important citizen behind Daniel Decatur Emmett, the author of the rebel war anthem “Dixie” and my childhood neighbor, the Hollywood Squares center square comedian Paul Lynde.
John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, the son of a New England “Minuteman” moved to the new state of Ohio in the early 1800s and set up apple orchards to supply immigrant pioneers. Most of his orchards and land holdings were in central Ohio – one was on the north riverbank of the Kokosing River in my hometown. Johnny Appleseed dressed in borrowed clothing, cared for injured animals and walked barefoot with a tin pot on his head across Ohio spreading the Swedenborg faith, a faith speaking to the connection between the spiritual and material planes that later inspired Emerson and apple seeds. In school, we all had to show up in class one day a year with one of our mother’s tin pots on our heads.
Anyway, one of his Kokosing riverbank properties, sold off after his passing, became the site of the local tire store – Knerr Tire. The proprietor, Toby Knerr, was a family friend and better still, owned an airplane – N6022P. On weekends I’d wash it for a free ride. In high school, I chased after his daughter Leslie, but she wisely turned down every phone call for a date, sensing I was probably really lusting (there’s that sin, again) more after her dad’s plane.
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I’m sure there’s a sin of insincerity buried in there somewhere, let alone the sin of lust and the new sin of flying. Great. 17 years old and I’m steeped in sin.
Carbon Dioxide was discovered by Joseph Black in Scotland in the 1750s. I doubt John Chapman knew about the merger of two atoms of oxygen to one of carbon, so let’s put all this sin in his currency – trees. An average tree absorbs about 45 pounds of CO2 per year, so here’s the ledger of my sin:
The sin of Flight: 1,895,000 / 45 = 42,111 trees
The Sin of Driving: 434,000 / 45 = 9,644 trees
The Sin of Architecture: 2,281,950,000/ 45 = 50,710,000 trees
For a total penance of 50,761,755 trees.
Now to be fair to myself, I’ve got another 22 years or so left according to the actuarial tables, so my real debt to this world upon my passing, assuming I immediately cease flying, driving and drawing is really a much more modest 2,307,352 trees.
I feel better already. Time to celebrate with a martini.
Now, a typical North American forest averages 50 trees per acre. So, the land required to indulge the indulgence of my penance of the modest 2,307,352 trees is around 46,147 acres. According to Wikipedia, the county I grew up in, Knox County, the county of Johnny Appleseed, has a total area of 530 square miles or 339200 acres of which 525 square miles is land and 4.1 square miles (0.8%) is water. Approximately 58% of the county is farmland and 28% is forested or about 94976 acres.
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I’ll have to piss off some farmers to steer clear of purgatory.
For measure, Central Park in New York weighs in at 843 acres, with an estimated 39 trillion dollars in potential property value if converted to speculative development. To offset my sins, I’d need to create another 54 Central Parks, with a combined land value of $2.1 to the fifteenth power.
Greed.
I better put on the tin pot hat and get busy.

Penance

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<h5>Navigating a new career postgrad is something that no level of schooling can quite prepare you for. You’re now part of the hustle of a busy architecture office, saddled with new responsibilities and learning how to get into the flow of it all. From juggling a major client project for the first time to becoming a champion of your firm’s culture, knowing how to find balance and present your best self can be challenging. I’ve been there, and since starting at TVS I’ve developed four helpful habits to live by:</h5>
Align your goals with your firm’s goals.
Place your effort into working with a company that has goals you’d like to support and that you feel confident will, in return, support you in your goals. Aligning your goals with the company’s goals creates a foundation for future development both personally and within the company. This union can be difficult to find or develop but it’s a good way to ensure you’re set up for professional success. This doesn’t mean things will be easy or that the employees and firm leadership will always agree, however, it creates fertile ground upon which a relationship can be defined and cultivated. For example, if sustainability is one of your core values, it’s worth considering a firm committed to high-performance design. By embedding yourself within an organization aligned with your core values, harmony pervades through yourself, the company, and the work.
Keep it professional even in non-professional contexts.
After spending any length of time with a company, inevitably you’ll find yourself involved in activities that take place outside of the office. Many of these activities begin as in-office meetings that require professional discipline but can frequently end up as recreational activities often involving alcohol. It’s imperative to recognize that you have autonomy and demonstrate awareness of your circumstances and surroundings. Your reputation precedes you wherever you go, and you never get a second chance at a first impression.
All companies have different expectations for what’s considered acceptable. Knowing your company culture and being in alignment with that culture is the best way to ensure a continued long-term relationship. No one will tell you what you can and cannot do, and having a healthy awareness of the guidelines for expected public decorum within your company culture is a good way to manage yourself and your relationship with the company.
Yes is nothing without how.
Many recent graduates are tempted to take on everything in the hopes of finding their bearings within your office. Many people appreciate someone who’s able to step up and help with an urgent task, especially at the last minute. While this can be a good strategy for learning the ropes and potential advancement, it’s not always the best strategy for maintaining work-life balance long term. Saying “yes” to everything can easily lead to being overloaded, negatively impacting your quality of life and eventually leading to burnout.
If you want to say “yes” to something that’s not directly assigned from your supervisor, make sure what you’re already assigned is not being affected. Equally important because there’s a finite number of hours in a work week, before you say “yes”, first ask “how?” Talk through your current workload and show how your schedule is being impacted before taking on a new task. This is for the benefit of both yourself and the other parties involved. By centering the task around a schedule, it becomes easier to see how your time is being spent and how to properly align expectations to the potential task’s deadline. By asking how, you not only vet the assignment but also what it would take to deliver additional requirements. Everyone has a clearer understanding of what is to take place, when and why.
Talk with the people who work at and with your office.
Amid working to advance your personal and career development, it’s important to speak with people involved in your work, even if the relationship is only tangential. This could be anyone from an engineering consultant to a designer in a different studio. Within any firm, there are always opportunities to help create something new for the company, which in the process improves your own personal development. Leadership from different disciplines often see your capabilities being utilized differently from perhaps your direct supervisor. This creates an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary approach to ideas that can lead to places an individual may have not thought to go. The key to this is simply having a conversation over coffee or perhaps eating together –initiating opportunities for connection with someone from another studio or even saying a quick “hello” in passing can go a long way towards building new work relationships. It doesn’t have to start out as a formal thing.
In the end, it’s a process of discovery that allows us to synthesize our abilities and use them in unexpected ways. It doesn’t always work, but when it does work, we unlock potential not only within ourselves but within each other as well.
Ultimately, hitting the right stride in your first job after college is all about being a sponge. Listening well and observing carefully to what’s going on around you will help you adapt to your new work setting and allow you to make the most of your experience with your first firm. I’ll be sharing more about my experience as a new employee with TVS. Until next time…
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