‘Exuberant’ concept released for convention center

Renderings from Kansas City-based architecture firm Populous Inc. depict a vision for a 250,000-square-foot downtown Springfield convention and events center, estimated at $175 million in advance of the design.

Springfield City Manager David Cameron told Springfield Business Journal that the city’s use of a construction manager at risk model of delivery, coupled with any needed adjustments in the final design, is anticipated to keep the project cost within the projected budget, and revisions will be made if needed.

Released March 19 – six days after a scheduled reveal was canceled at the request of Populous – the preliminary design was informed by a series of community workshops, Springfield officials say.

The center would move forward with funds from an additional 3% tourism tax to be collected from overnight guests in hotel, motel and short-term rental accommodations inside the city limits, if voters approve the tax in the April 7 election.

The center is proposed for the 600 block of East St. Louis Street in a design that would renovate and add to the existing Springfield Expo Center.

The design features intersecting upturned walls of white stone and glass curtain and maintains and emphasizes the curved front of the current 112,000-square-foot Expo Center.

“This is something to build on,” said Tim Rosenbury, the city’s director of quality of place initiatives, during the design reveal event. “What’s key in this image is that the Expo Center is part of the project, and we’re acknowledging the Expo Center even in the new design, but this kind of points to the future.”

He added, “The addition is intentionally even more exuberant, more iconic and more memorable, and I think just as transparent, if not more so.”

The presentation unveiled seven views of the proposed center, with city officials emphasizing that they were not finished designs but rather concept drawings.

“At this stage, this is not by any means a final proposed architectural solution, but instead is something to help us imagine what this project can become,” Rosenbury said. 

Design features
In the concept images, the open grass area between the Expo Center and the 977-space Jordan Valley Car Park is mostly maintained, but a portion is used for a building addition that includes an elevated ballroom.

“In this idea, the ballroom is actually elevated up high enough so that you start to get horizon views of Springfield. You move your way up through these transparent public spaces,” Rosenbury said.

He added that the building’s public spaces are more than just hallways or concourses, but they can be used for meetings and programming.

The design also shows a greenscape roof and solar collectors. Portions of the roof could be used as outdoor meeting spaces as well, Rosenbury said, stressing the possibility of both indoor and outdoor activation of the space.

“Multipurpose is a term that would guide the final plan for the center,” he said – “not only the kind of spare but well-equipped, open kind of space that characterizes the existing expo hall, which by the way would be increased in area by more than a third, but also the kind of meeting, banquet and reception spaces which would be finished appropriate to the range of activities hosted there.”

The design has 125,000 square feet of program space, Rosenbury said, and another 125,000 square feet will be needed for support spaces, like restrooms, kitchens, concourses and storage. 

Karen Spence, professor of architecture at Mississippi State University and formerly of Drury University, said the proposed design appears to be harmonious with the existing Expo Center and other Springfield structures.

“It does mimic the Expo Center that exists there,” she said. “It would be something that people might talk about and remember as it becomes part of the definition of the city in some ways.”

Spence said the public space is appealing, with the center serving as a visual extension of Jordan Valley Park to its north.

“Sometimes you go to convention centers, and you think, ‘Am I in Houston, or am I in Philadelphia?’” she said. “This design’s connection to the outdoors really celebrates the Ozarks.”

Absent: conference hotel
Missing from the renderings is a sense of where an attached hotel might go. A conference hotel would be a private sector project, not part of the city’s funding request to voters, but the 2025 report by Chicago-based Hunden Partners Inc. that is guiding the convention center effort described an attached 400-room hotel with a recognized brand as essential to the project, according to past reporting. The report set the cost of such a hotel at $209 million.

Asked about the hotel component during the design reveal, Rosenbury said one or two sites have been identified, but the city does not have control of those properties. However, he said, a private developer might be able to obtain control of them.

“Given that this building is open to several different directions and will have multiple entrances around it to allow for simultaneous events, that also ties into that idea that we can come in at ground level, sub-ground level or even above on the second or third floor and tie in from other places,” he said.

But designing a connection is premature at this point, according to Rosenbury.

“The reality is that until this project becomes a certainty, no developer will come forward and commit until they know for sure that this is going to happen,” he said. “This, again, is why April 7 is so important.”

The aerial view of the center concept does not clearly indicate a location where a hotel might go. The design takes up the whole block between Trafficway Street on the north and St. Louis Street on the south. Horizontally it spans from the Abou Ben Adhem Shrine Mosque, maintained to the west, to the grass lawn on the east – an area incorporated into the concept – and the Jordan Valley Car Park that will likely be needed for convention center parking, which is also absent from the rendering.

Across Trafficway to the north are the city’s Brightspeed Ice Park and Jordan Valley Park, leaving only the area on the south. That now houses the sweeping front lawn and structure of Missouri State University’s Kentwood Hall, which is the historic Kentwood Arms Hotel, and the University Plaza Hotel & Convention Center, privately owned and operated by Atrium Hospitality.

SBJ reached out to two local developers of hotel properties – Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Hospitality Management LLC and Gordon Elliott of Elliott Lodging Ltd. – to gauge their interest in investing in convention center hotel. 

Elliott, who serves as treasurer for two political action committees supporting the convention center project, did not respond to an email query asking about his interest in the hotel project.

O’Reilly indicated it was too soon to say without a request for proposals from the city in an email sent before the reveal event.

“If the city issues an RFP for a convention center hotel, we would like to see it and would potentially consider participating in the process, but we have no information about the size, scope and timing of the project, so it’s hard to comment further,” he said. “We do not have independent plans to develop a convention center hotel.”

Asked if she sees space for a hotel to be constructed, Spence offered a definitive yes.

“There are parking lots nearby,” she said. “As cities densify, those parking lots can easily be places where you have underground parking or you build a parking deck. There would be space, and you would not even have to tear down any of the nice greenspace, big trees or anything like that.”