The trouble with convention centers

Yesterday I went to the Oregon Convention Center for the Wordstock festival to hear an old friend from my 1990s Willamette Week days, Dale Basye, read from his new kids book, Rapacia: Second Circle of Heck. After that, I happened upon another colleague, Oregonian film critic Shawn Levy, talking about his Paul Newman biography. It was a great way to spend a Portland autumn afternoon, except for one thing: I couldn't wait to get out of the building.

This is not a blog post about how the Oregon Convention Center's design (courtesy of ZGF Architecture) is vastly inferior to convention centers in other cities. It's fairly handsome on the outside, particularly its curving portion of the southeast facade and its wall of glass along Martin Luther King Boulevard. I also like how its twin spires on the top of the building frame views of Mt. Saint Helens. And the building was LEED-rated upon its expansion a few years ago.

"The Oregon Convention Center (OCC) is the largest convention center in the Pacific Northwest, making it an ideal venue for conventions, industry trade shows, meetings, and banquets," its website crows. "The center's two grand ballrooms, 50 meeting rooms, 255,000 square feet of exhibit space, full-service catering, and experienced staff can handle events of any size, from 10 to 10,000."

Compared to the other convention centers I've been to in other cities like Chicago, Austin and New York, ours is about the same in terms of the experience. In each case, the public areas are pleasant enough, with massive walls of glass bringing in a bounty of natural light, usually to a voluminous two-story space.

But then when it's time to  venture in to the actual belly of these convention centers, one must abandon all natural light in favor of a windowless room with oppressive fluorescent illumination and antiseptic, lowest-common-denominator interiors: usually temporary carpets over concrete floors.

Convention centers can be a big economic draw for most cities, bringing in a succession of out-of-town groups to meet: Shriners, teachers unions, collectors, you name it. I mean, why would I have gone to Texas if not for the green building conference there a few years ago? The thousands of people coming from out of town to the OCC contribute to our local economy, staying in our hotels and eating in our restaurants. And in terms of design, it's clear that these buildings need to be able to offer a very flexible series of spaces to cater to a variety of needs.

That's especially true of the massive-volumed exhibit hall spaces in every convention center, such as the one I visited on Sunday. They are big enough to hold the exhibitors that often bankroll these conventions. In the case of Wordstock, the stages where authors read were wrapped around the exhibitors, and that was no coincidence.

Still, as I sat in the massive Exhibit Hall A hearing my friends read from their books, all I could think about was wanting to be away from the terrible lighting, the concrete block, the carpets that grandma seemingly picked out, and the high priced and bad tasting concessions. That's not even mentioning the miles one walks in the Oregon Convention Center, constantly up and down stairways and escalators or down quarter-mile hallways, to get to anything.

I tried to think where Wordstock could be held next year and came up with only mixed results. In terms of the readings, any number of downtown spaces could accommodate. If Wordstock were in the Pearl District, for example, events could be held at the Gerding Theater for the big authors, as well as the Wieden + Kennedy and Ziba auditoriums and Powell's Books. If it were downtown, you could anchor things at the Portland Center for Performing Arts with additional readings at the Portland Art Museum's Mark Building auditorium. But in each case, where would you put the exhibitors? This is probably why Wordstock has stayed at the Convention Center despite the oppressive ambiance it offers.

The Oregon Convention Center just went through an expansion a few years ago, and for all intents and purposes it functions well already. And given its configuration, I'm not sure there would be any way to change things in order to bring natural light into the exhibit spaces. What's more, they probably wouldn't even want to do so. Natural light is much harder to control, and these spaces are all about providing flexible interior environments that get changed out on practically a daily basis.

Even so, if Portland wants to brand itself as a sustainability capital, what if we were to re-invent the way convention centers are designed to make them more open to the outside world?

I don't know what the attendance figures were for Wordstock. Most of the two hours I was there, the authors enjoyed fairly sizable crowds for their readings. Even so, attendance had to be affected by the fact that people feel outright robbed of a beautiful fall day when they're in this building. Coming out onto MLK Boulevard at 5:00, even though I'd seen two friends and colleagues read from works I liked very much, I felt physically affected by being inside the OCC, a kind of temporary sick-building syndrome that I had to shake off.

Over the last decade or two there has been a plethora of research demonstrating that human physiology is adversely affected by spaces without natural light. Employees in basement offices take longer breaks than their coworkers with cubicles near windows. The Portland Building, famous for its lack of natural light thanks to tiny windows, comes with increased rates of sick leave for employees working there versus other City office spaces. Studies have shown schoolchildren get higher average test scores in windowed classrooms, and in retail cash registers beneath skylights rack up more sales than other cash registers a few feet away. Why does all this knowledge have to be ignored just because it's an extra big space where people sometimes show slides?

Comments

[Ken Bauer]

I hear you on this. Maybe these centers could be retrofited with Glass ceilings to let natural light in. Also indoor vegetation and water features could add to the ambiance of the inner halls. All these ideas could add to making these facilities less sterile.

[mongoose]

unfortunately, most of the people who make their living from huge conferences, or attend them, are a-holes and do not care about local color or green... unless you are referring to money. The out of towners who stay at a huge corporate hotel and eat at Applebees and rent cars (despite everything being easy MAX). I think the convention center is rather nice from the outside, very nice in fact, the vines on the back, the landscaping, the connection to transit, the visual connection to downtown, the construction quality are all great things. I couldn't care less about the interiors: designed by committee and paid for by greed. But i will take the nurse log thank you.

[Mike Barker]

Here is an interesting take on the issue - quotes from Keith Yancey.

So it seems the Professional know about this - its probably the budgets that prevent the use of carfully controlled daylight ?

Quote :-

“Anyone who has ever walked the exhibition halls of a traditional convention center is familiar with the slightly dazed feeling of time standing still. The standard function of a “black box” convention space, after all, is to make exhibited products look the same whether it’s eight in the morning or six in the evening.

“It’s like a sensory deprivation tank,” laughs Keith Yancey, senior associate of Cambridge, Massachusetts–based LAM Partners, the lighting firm that collaborated with Rafael Viñoly Architects on redefining the trade-show experience at
the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittburgh. “

End Quote

[dennis]

I hate to break it to you Brian, but Pittsburgh has already beaten us to this one. Their convention center is everything you wish ours was.

[Laurence]

Very good comments! The answer may be somewhere in your consideration of the Pearl District's half-a-dozen venues spread throughout the district. If there were a logistical management strategy for an out of town convention to use all those venues throughout a district at once, it would be a much more engaging, urban, and economically stimulating experience for conventioneers and the citizens alike. A mixed-use civic district, in which convention-goers walk down streets past shops, galleries, apartments and restaurants, is allot more engaging and multifunctional than the current "big box convention" model.

In contrast, convention centers have only one function: conventions. As you stated, participants rarely leave the building to engage with the rest of the city. And citizens of the city infrequently use the convention building, at least in my experience.

Break convention centers into several smaller buildings with civic spaces, streets, retail and residents in between. Let's think urban, not suburban 'big box'.

[billb]

visitors hate the Rain , unless you build tunnels thru the pearl , good luck

[lander]

tunnels... love it. go one step further, build the whole thing underground with attached mega hotel above. oh, wait, i am sure that has already been done.

[Laurence]

Billb,
Just hand out rain slickers in the little convention bag of tricks, and send them out onto the street. They'll love the fresh air, people-watching, and street life.

Otherwise, we might as well give up, remove streets, and build mega-malls, as was done in many America downtowns in the '60's....so that shoppers could avoid the rain.

[Bygningsentreprise]

Nice work on your article. Thank you for showing this article online and the photo look so excellent. Keep up the good work.