McCormick Place Convention Center West Expansion
Award of Merit: Public Works
The $850 million West Building at McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago is a 2,385,077-sq-ft addition.
The addition allows McCormick Place to remain the biggest exhibition facility in the United States.
It includes 459,000 sq ft of exhibition space, 140,750 sq ft of meeting/banquet space, a 103,750-sq-ft ballroom and food and support services.
Future of Conventions
The design serves to prepare McCormick Place for the future of the convention industry, which is increasingly dominated by professional association meetings.
In support of the trend toward smaller, meeting-based conventions, the West Hall contains nearly the same amount of meeting space as the South Hall with just over half the amount of exhibit hall space.
The West Building is designed to respond to its surroundings both from an urban plan standpoint and architecturally.
The street level entries are designed to engage the neighborhood, providing glass view-ports into the building along three sides. The freight service roadway system is contained entirely within screened private routes, eliminating setup and teardown truck traffic from local public roads.
The exterior materials and forms celebrate the scale of the building and its gigantic spaces while responding in material and detail to the surrounding historic neighborhood to the west, which is populated with mid-rise masonry industrial lofts and commercial buildings.
The site of the West Building was a collection of parcels continuously used since the settlement of Chicago’s South Side in the early 1830s. The last generation of buildings was constructed as support for the adjacent Motor Row district and other midsized industrial users.
As a result, several properties contained underground tanks and other contamination, making the overall site a brownfield requiring remediation of significant scale.
Construction of the building on a fast track required an unprecedented degree of communication and cooperation among agencies. Indeed, the project required nearly 250 separate permits for work, ranging from lane closures to relocation of a historic facade to the main permit for the 2.4-million-sq-ft convention center.
The West Building is the largest LEED Certified building nationwide. Elements that contributed to site credits include those for brownfield site remediation, landscape and heat island reductions and stormwater management that included a 3,500-ft tunnel to recharge Lake Michigan with clean rooftop runoff.
Jury Comments: “They handled the massive scale of the project well. It’s hard to overlook the impact that the project involves on the economy and built environment.”
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