Convention Center Bets Bigger Is Better : Tourism: Expansion creates a huge space that rivals facilities in other cities. But the run-down area and a lack of adjacent hotels cloud prospects.

The new exhibition hall at the Los Angeles Convention Center is, to get the journalistic cliche over quickly, as big as seven football fields scrunched together. It is a room so large that workers ride motorcycles and golf carts across its concrete floors.

Inside the huge space, a first-time visitor has the dizzying sense of lost perspective, finally realizing that what looked like human-sized back doors are really 24-foot-high bays for massive tractor-trailers to drive onto the convention floor. The round signs for restrooms turn out to be five feet in diameter.

Clearly, the planners and architects of the $500-million Los Angeles Convention Center expansion were thinking big. They had to, they contend.

Los Angeles’ 22-year-old Convention Center long had been eclipsed in capacity and amenities by those in San Diego, Anaheim and San Francisco, not to mention Chicago, New York and Atlanta. Unless it kept up with the municipal Joneses, Los Angeles faced a continued exodus of valuable conventions and trade shows at a time when the city’s blemished image frightens some potential tourists.

As a result, the most expensive publicly financed building in the city’s history opens next month with weighty and debated expectations about its role in the Los Angeles economy. Its planners contend that the center’s new size and capabilities will overcome concerns about its location in a run-down section of Downtown and the lack of adjacent hotels.

“When a client is looking for a convention center, he will see the Convention Center of Los Angeles and say, ‘Yeah, that’s the building I want to be in,’ ” said Chris Simons, senior coordinator for the Los Angeles center expansion. Such emphasis on the building itself reverses the approach of others cities, which sell a client “on the city first and then take him to their convention center,” Simons said.

The goal is to snare the national-oriented meetings that boost economies far more than the local trade shows that have been the Convention Center’s mainstay.

Beyond economics, officials believe they have created a new landmark that anchors Downtown’s south end and eventually will revitalize a neglected stretch of the Figueroa Street corridor. They hope that the Convention Center will give post-riot Los Angeles a psychological boost, as the recent reopening of the Central Library did.

With facades of tinted glass and brightly colored metal sheets, the project more than doubles the center’s size, up to 805,000 square feet in exhibition and meeting spaces stretching from 11th Street to Venice Boulevard along Figueroa. The new and old wings are connected by a two-story concourse of meeting rooms bridging Pico Boulevard.

The center has jumped from 27th largest in the nation to eighth, according to a ranking by the industry publication Tradeshow Week. (The biggest by far remains McCormick Place in Chicago, with 1.8 million square feet.)

The design by James Ingo Freed, also architect of the acclaimed Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York, certainly is eye-catching. The original low-slung box that opened in 1971 remains at 11th Street next to the Harbor Freeway, but fades into the background next to its glitzier sister.

Most astonishing are the two new lobbies, set in towers of glass panels and white crisscross metal tubing. One lobby’s ceiling soars 150 feet above Figueroa Street and the smaller is 130 feet high. As if to symbolize the ambition of the place, the larger lobby’s floor is covered with a terrazzo map of the world while the other depicts the Milky Way galaxy, with Earth’s

Pacific Coast and its moon forming a colossal doormat.

“This is not just another convention center, this is important civic architecture,” said Ki Suh Park, managing partner of Los Angeles-based Gruen Associates, which worked on the design with Freed, of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners of New York. “This will set the tone for Downtown. So we wanted to be sure the design achieved that goal.”

Architecture critics have yet to publicly judge the center. But the people who really count--potential customers and convention planning experts--say they came away from pre-opening tours impressed by the building’s design, its ability to hold several big shows at once and its amenities, such as numerous food facilities and a business service center.

Yet financial skeptics wonder whether even a highly praised structure can attract enough out-of-town guests to pay off the construction bonds, as planned, through hotel bed taxes. Because the recession has stalled proposals to build adjacent hotels and improve the neighborhood, concerns remain about the center’s bookings. Plus, Los Angeles is a tougher sell since the riots last year.

Not counting local-oriented trade shows, which will continue, the center has 19 major conventions booked through the end of 1994, about half of its capacity, officials report.

“In the short term, we really have to hustle to get the business, but we don’t think we’ll have problems in the long term,” said Gary Sherwin, spokesman for the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau. He said large hotels are a quick shuttle bus ride away.

Money worries are being downplayed for now as workers polish the terrazzo floors and clean glass handrails in preparation for the mid-November opening with the International Assn. of Amusement Parks and Attractions. Roller coasters, carousels and flume rides are to fill the two main halls and the large outdoor plaza named for Gilbert Lindsay, the late city councilman who represented Downtown. More than 18,000 conventioneers from around the world are expected to attend the four-day gathering.

That opening will arrive after many difficulties. With the help of the Community Redevelopment Agency, the expansion required relocation of 1,400 residents and many of the 128 businesses from the site. As with the library, the convention project adds onto an existing structure, complicated in this case by the constraint of the Harbor Freeway to the immediate rear and by the need to build south over Pico Boulevard without blocking traffic.

The design solution emerged from something that most pedestrians and motorists rarely notice, architect Freed said. Figueroa intersects Pico on a slight angle and straightens out as it heads south. That bend in the road--”a very happy accident”--allowed Freed to contemplate a landmark that could be seen on street level from the business district to the north.

“That kink in Figueroa, the fact that it’s not straight, meant that corner stands out. It made everything more visible,” Freed said. “It suggested a central point, a lobby.”

In addition, Freed wanted something high enough to be seen by motorists on the elevated freeway. And he wanted a glass covered structure that would allow visitors inside to enjoy views of Downtown skyscrapers from the odd angle. The result he calls “a bottle,” the 150-foot-high lobby with trusses that reminds some guests of a futuristic launch pad over artist Alexis Smith’s world floor map focusing on the Pacific Rim. Visitors ascend escalators and steps to the new South Hall, which is 346,890 square feet.

Officials were concerned that the older, smaller Yorty Hall might be seen as inferior even though it was to be spruced up. So a second, somewhat lower lobby tower was placed in front of it, and Smith later designed the galaxy floor for that entrance. The connecting concourse includes a 299-seat theater with high-tech video capacity. In what they describe as a colorful attraction for freeway motorists, the rear truck docks of the new wing are sheathed in bright green and blue metal. “I tried to get the feel for Los Angeles,” Freed said. “And somehow get the feel for how the city is in the building. It’s a lot less formal city than New York and much of the architecture is livelier.”

A desire to host a national political convention, possibly the Democrats in 1996, shaped the interior. Those conventions require a very big room supported by few structural columns, to avoid blocking television camera shots. On a tour of South Hall, Park pointed out where he envisions the podium would be, where the network anchor booths might locate. Along its outer edges, South Hall has 17 columns up to the 60-foot-high ceiling, allowing important, clear sight lines.

For convention planners, such function is probably more important than style. The amusement park operators want to be sure their rides can fit inside rooms. Computer shows want enough electrical outlets on the floors.

“You can’t just react to what is beautiful if you don’t know anything about truck docks,” said Don Jewell, president of Facility Consultants Inc., a Scottsdale, Ariz., firm that helps with designs of convention centers nationwide, not including Los Angeles’.

Jewell praised the Los Angeles center for its client-pleasing details and size but cautioned that the lack of a large, adjacent hotel and family-oriented attractions in Downtown will hurt business.

But artist Smith believes that visitors will be so impressed that they will bring repeat trade to the Los Angeles center.

“If you’re going to spend a lot of money on a public building, shouldn’t it be something fabulous rather than something to be endured?” Smith said. “Only in the past 50 years or so, people have expected public buildings to be unpleasant or a neutral backdrop. Hopefully, this will be more enriching and more fun. And having a good public space is good for business.”

Expanding Center More than doubling its size on a 63-acre Downtown site, the newly expanded Los Angeles Convention Center now extends southward from 11th Street to Venice Boulevard, bridging over Pico Boulevard in the middle. With the Harbor Freeway to the west, the center’s design takes advantage of a bend in Figueroa Street at Pico as a location for its glass tower lobby. Source: Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau