$1.7B Convention Center Expansion Underway in Seattle

Washington State Convention Center, Summit Expansion

The 1.4 million-square-foot expansion of the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle has commenced, with Clark Construction and partner Lease Crutcher Lewis spearheading preconstruction for the $1.7 billion project. The Clark-Lewis joint venture secured the $960 million construction contract from King County Public Facilities District, owner and operator of WSCC, in 2016.

Summit will sit on the site of the former Convention Station bus facility, just one block from Arch, the existing WSCC building, thereby creating a convention center campus. The construction of Summit is scheduled to reach completion in 2021, with the new facility opening for events in 2022.

“Because of the demand of meetings in Seattle, the Washington State Convention Center broke ground on the Summit building in August 2018, whereby we began actively selling two convention center buildings downtown. No other convention destination that we are aware of has this scenario,” as noted in a prepared statement by Visit Seattle, the official destination marketing organization for Seattle and King County.

Washington State Convention Center, Summit Expansion

The Summit addition, designed by LMN Architects, will include approximately 250,000 square feet of exhibition space, meeting rooms totaling 125,000 square feet of and 60,000 square feet of ballroom space. As part of its contract, Clark-Lewis led a series of construction program components, or early projects, vital to Summit-related infrastructure. The list of early projects included the installation of a substation at the entrance of the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel, as well as the development of a temporary bus ramp through the jobsite. The partners also relocated the Convention Place Station communication room into the Seattle Transit Tunnel to facilitate continued city bus operations. And in one of the more complex undertakings, the joint venture temporarily relocated Olive Way, a major artery in the downtown corridor, and installed a three-lane roadway as a temporary replacement.

Juggling

Clark has a bevy of projects in the works. On behalf of developers The Meridian Group and Kettler, the company is nearing completion of the 1.7 million-square-foot initial phase of The Boro, a transit-oriented development just outside Washington, D.C., in Tysons, Va. Under a $330 million contract, Clark is also constructing the Howard Hughes Corp. and Riverside Investment & Development’s 1.4 million-square-foot 110 North Wacker trophy office tower in Chicago. Additionally, Clark just announced that it will be the lead contractor in a construction joint venture for a new 1 million-square-foot terminal at Kansas City International Airport in Missouri.

Images courtesy of LMN Architects