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David L. Lawrence Convention Center: An engineering, design triumph and what a roof!
Friday, February 22, 2002 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Architecture Critic
To get a sense of the scale of the new convention center they were designing for Pittsburgh, and just for fun, architects in Rafael Vinoly's office compared the size of their own living spaces to the center's floor plan.
One architect was able to fit his apartment inside the shaft of the 9-by-21-foot elevator that will serve the center's kitchen.
While that says something about the size of New York City apartments, it also speaks to the vastness of the convention center, which will stretch the length of three football fields along the Allegheny River.
When the center's complete in the spring of 2003, visitors will be impressed to see so much open, column-free space -- none of it devoted to football -- under a single roof.
And what a roof.
It soars. It sails. It sweeps up from river to skyline in a simple, dramatic gesture that links the two and echoes the arcing forms and engineering triumphs of Pittsburgh bridges.
For all its rigor and size, Vinoly's convention center comes ashore lightly and gracefully, like a sailboat, but with the ample deck of an ocean liner -- part Queen Mary, part Mary Ann, raising 15 masts against the sky.
Standing on the fourth-floor promenade deck that cantilevers over Fort Duquesne Boulevard, you're thrust into the Port-of-Pittsburgh panorama. With the gleaming stainless-steel roof behind you and bridges cascading upriver and down, you're caught up in a lilting urban rhythm. Vinoly, a classical pianist, has captured the cadence of this river city.
For now, though, the promenade is still under construction and off limits. Visitors to the recreational vehicle show, which opens tomorrow, will have to be content with seeing only a small part of the $354 million convention center -- if you can call two large exhibition halls, with a total of 125,000 square feet, small.
The main exhibit hall, under the soaring roof, is a clean, crisp, bright space filled with natural light -- a feature common in European exhibit halls but not in America. The roof, more than a grand gesture, is one of the center's many "green," or energy-efficient, features, allowing air coming off the river to be pulled in at the third floor and circulated inside the building through natural convection. Hot air will rise and exit through vents in the crescent-shaped clerestory at the top of the roof.
When it's too cold or hot outside to use natural ventilation, warm and cool air will be supplied through giant fabric tubes that arc over the hall, inflating and deflating like kinetic sculpture. These Ductsox, as they're called, are made of a thin polyester material used in boat sails.
The crescent-shaped clerestory is covered in a Teflon-coated fiberglass fabric, the same material that covers London's Millennium Dome. It doesn't deteriorate, needs no cleaning and feels like a thin plastic, but from a distance looks like soft, translucent muslin. It also will be used to create panels that suspend from and camouflage the metal roof, giving it a floating, tent-like appearance and softening an austere space.
Both the cable-supported roof and the clerestory walls on the sides of the building are designed to be flexible. The 4-foot-by-10-foot clerestory glass panes, surrounded by silicone sealant gaskets and sleeved around cables, will breathe with the wind.
The sloping steel roof won't have water running down it in warm weather, as originally intended; it wouldn't have provided enough cooling to justify the cost.
Instead, the architects propose a dramatic new water feature, one that visitors will be able to walk through, that will begin at the junction of the proposed hotel and the convention center.
The hotel, to be designed by L.D. Astorino Associates, will be V-shaped, as in Vinoly's original design, creating the plaza he intended at the corner of Tenth Street and Penn Avenue. This is exceptionally good news, as it preempts an earlier plan from a different developer, who had it straddling Penn Avenue and walling off the Strip District.
From the plaza, you'll be able to see the river through a sunken, 400-foot-long corridor running between the north-south lanes of a divided Tenth Street under the hotel and the convention center.
An earlier scheme showed this corridor as a stark, sterile concrete tunnel with sidewalks flanking a meager trough of water. Vinoly's new design reverses the elements, creating lush walls of water that feed a series of 12- to-15-inch-deep pools on both sides of a meandering path of terrazzo concrete -- a stunning improvement that will create one of the city's signature spaces.
Visually, if not actually, the sunken fountain will appear to be feeding the river. The Miami firm Arquitectonica showed a canal with pools and fountains in its convention center competition entry, but credit Mayor Tom Murphy with pushing for it here.
Another great public space will be the third-floor terrace on the convention center's south side, which faces the backs of Penn Avenue loft buildings. No need to "beautify" these gritty exteriors, with their metal fire escapes, protruding vents and faded, painted signs -- "Home of ATCO Trousers," one reads. It's like walking onto a "West Side Story" set. Between two of these old soldier buildings, there's a marvelous, jagged sliver of skyline, framing the Koppers, Gulf and USX towers.
Attached to this terrace are the ends of the massive cables that anchor the roof -- another reminder that this spectacular building is a work of both innovative engineering and imaginative architecture. It seems hard to overestimate what it will do for Pittsburgh when it's finished.
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