Team including Las Vegas collaborators recommended for LVCC expansion
A design and architectural team that includes an Atlanta company and four Las Vegas-based collaborators has been recommended to design the $1.4 billion Las Vegas Convention Center expansion and renovation project.
TVS Design, which worked with TSK Architects, Simpson Coulter Studio, Carpenter Sellers Del Gatto Architects and KME Architects, scored highest in a six-hour design competition staged Oct. 25.
A panel of Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority staff members, representatives from the Las Vegas Convention Center District Committee, the Oversight Panel of Convention Facilities in Clark County and an independent third-party consultant with construction experience judged and scored the competition between three design teams.
The panel will make its recommendation to the seven-member Las Vegas Convention Center District Committee, which meets Tuesday to make a formal recommendation to the full LVCVA board of directors.
The board is expected to decide on the contract at its Nov. 14 meeting.
No design price yet
By statute, the prospective designer may not submit professional fees or compensation rates until after the selection, assuring that the choice is based on qualifications and competence to perform the job.
A negotiated contract for design services which would include the scope, schedule and fees will be brought back to the LVCVA board at a later date.
TVS Design received a score of 508 out of a possible 600 points in the competition. New York-based RV Architecture, which worked with the Friedmutter Group of Las Vegas, scored 491 while Kansas City, Missouri-based Populous, working with three Las Vegas entities, Klai Juba Wald Architects, LG Architects and ZimmerRay Studios, had 473.
The TVS Design presentation featured a towering peaked screen that could project images like the Fremont Street Experience.
TVS, whose partners have participated on the UNLV Lied Library, T-Mobile Arena and McCarran International Airport Terminal 3 projects, showed the peaked overhead video screen system near Convention Center Drive. Partners said one of the strengths of the plan would be the ability to order fabricated steel almost immediately to avoid any potential delay for a projected CES 2021 opening.
Began in June
When the LVCVA board awards the contract later this month, it will wrap up a process that began in June.
The LVCVA issued a request for qualifications that received eight responses. That list was whittled to six to submit formal requests for proposals. Of those, finalists TVS, RV Architecture and Populous were chosen to make one-hour presentations in an unusual format that included two public boards and the public moving between four rooms at the Convention Center for the presentations and deliberations.
The two design teams that aren’t selected for the contract will receive $250,000 stipends for their efforts. The LVCVA will be allowed to keep their intellectual property in case there are ideas that can be taken from the other proposals.
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.
What’s next
Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority officials have said they hope to break ground on the new 600,000-square-foot exhibition hall early next year and have it completed in time for January 2021’s CES show.
After the new hall is online, workers will begin the process of sequentially renovating each existing hall and build connecting corridors to link every building.
Once completed in 2022, the Las Vegas Convention Center would become the second-largest meeting facility in North America behind Chicago’s McCormick Place.
