Irving Convention Center

Dallas, TX, United States

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Irving Convention Center

Dallas, TX, United States

Firm

Studio Hillier

Type

Commercial › Exhibition Center
Transport + Infrastructure › Parking

YEAR

2011

The north Texas landscape is flat, hot and braided by massive concrete highways. Caught in the vortex is Las Colinas, a 12,000-acre mixed-use development, where one enters their office though a darkened garage and glides from auto to elevator without so much as a whiff of grass cuttings; proof that architecture has the irreducible capacity to cleave the human population from nature.

The convention center is a counter proposal to the culture of containment that has proliferated in the DFW Metroplex. The stacking of program volumes is a strategy for being seen from the freeways while concentrating the program into a more modest footprint. Rotation of the volumes produces essential cantilevers needed to pulse the building into motion while generating blankets of shade on roof terraces and interior spaces. The roof of the 36-foot high exhibit hall is conceived as a quasi-public space with a restaurant/café and room for pop-up gatherings with skyline views. The dual stair/ramps invite curiosity and impel convention goers to perambulate.

The IVCB program of main exhibit hall, conference center and grand ballroom function as 3 separate venues on three levels, or conflate into a single spiraling network of business leisure functions. Human circulation is instrumentalized as its own event, a fluid morphology that intersects the building’s interiority and exteriority. The formal integration of the strategy oscillates between non- hierarchical indoor/ outdoor spaces that respond to the contemporary generative, global culture as a collection of performative and inviting spaces.

The exposed/veiled exoskeleton is an effective way to communicate real from the virtual and to attach some distinction and identity to Irving. Hybrid catenary trusses support the stacked/rotated floors above the clear-span 270’ x 190’ exhibit hall. The copper perforated panels subvert expectations of weight and mass in trade for transparency and illusion. The project earned LEED Platinum certification.