Start 2: McCormick Place West Building
Cost: $849 million

The McCormick Place Convention Center, Chicago's monumental exhibition center on the Near South Side, is continuing its trend of adding a building a decade with the construction of the McCormick Place West Building.

The new structure, slated for completion in late 2007 and occupancy in 2008, will add 470,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, 250,000 sq. ft. of meeting room space and a 100,000 sq. ft. ballroom, reportedly to be the largest in the Midwest, to the convention campus.

Historic Facade Moved

Demolition and site remediation, which got under way in spring 2004, included the relocation of a historic building facade, the Platt Luggage Building. McCormick Place West will rise on the site where the Platt building was built in 1908.

The Platt facade was deemed worth saving because famed architect Howard Van Doren Shaw designed it in the Beaux Arts style. The facade pieces were moved to the corner of Cermak Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, where they were reassembled in their original configuration and provide the first glimpse convention-goes see of the convention campus.

"It is being dismantled brick by brick and moved around the corner," said John Dix, project director for Chicago-based A. Epstein & Sons International Inc., one of the ten firms operating in the project consortium.

Tracy Browne, project executive in Chicago with consortium member Clark Construction Group of Bethesda, Md., said the project's biggest early concern was its sheer enormity and amount of coordination needed between the owner and various consortium members.

"We are all living together," Dix added, referring to the single floor of office space currently occupied by offices of consortium members and some of the principal sub-contractors on the project. "Having all our resources together on one floor has really made for a lot of speed in decision making."

But it is still a huge project with a lot of parties involved.

"It's a matter of marshaling a lot of people to all dance in the same direction," Dix said.

He added that changes in the project's scope and budget have presented challenges to all parties.

"Everyone still remembers what the job was at a higher price," he said. "Being able to arrive uniformly and equitably at the new price, with everyone being happy, is a challenge."

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