The USA’s first high-rise convention center opened for business in the center of Seattle – with 62 meeting rooms and over 53,000 square meters of event space it’s ready for functions of any size. Our team installed 61 elevators and escalators that continue to help run the show behind the scenes.
The convention center of the future already exists – the Seattle Convention Center’s new Summit building is surprising for its architecture, its use of space, and its location.
The huge building sits in the city’s downtown district – not on the outskirts of town, where you typically might expect to find a structure of this size. The restricted footprint of its location forced architects to rethink the typical layout of a convention center. They distributed the event space across 16 floors stacked atop one another, with some floors cantilevered like Lego blocks to leave space for the freeway that runs alongside the building.
This is how the first vertical convention center in the USA came into being. Our team installed 61 elevators and escalators that connect the different levels. Three centrally located freight elevators play the most critical role, linking the spaces that make up the building’s 53,000 square meter total area.
The scale of the project alone was impressive – it’s the largest building project in Seattle’s history.
Mike Sparks, our Project Manager for the Summit building, and his wife Lori moved across the country – from Indianapolis to Washington State – specifically for this project. Mike remembers the moment he saw the size of the initial excavation.
“As I walked up to this gigantic hole, I thought, why did I agree to do this?” he says with a laugh. “I’ve worked in the elevator industry for 27 years, but I’d never managed a project of this size before.”
Despite scheduling delays caused by archeological finds, the Covid-19 pandemic, and supply chain bottlenecks, Mike succeeded in bringing the project to life, working together with Lori, in her role as Associate Project Manager.
“It was a challenging project, but also an incredibly rewarding one,” says Lori. “It’s been a fantastic experience to live and work in a new city, and see this building come to life.”
The Summit building has created a new model for the sector. For a long time, convention centers have often been large windowless boxes. For this project, the architects used a lot of glass to remove the boundaries between indoors and outdoors as much as possible.
“This way the city then becomes a part of the experience we create within the building,” explains architect Leonardo da Costa, Director of LMN Architects Seattle. Regional identity influenced the choice of materials used in the center. Heavy industry plays an important role in the Pacific Northwest, and lumbering also has a long tradition in the area, and the design of the complex reflects that with its use of steel and wooden beams.
“The idea is not to have the building stand at the center of things, but for it to function as a framework,” explains Leonardo. “That way, the events taking place inside become visible to the surrounding city and Summit visitors can experience Seattle.”
Now that the Summit is open for business, our units ensure all deliveries can take place for events. This includes moving electronic equipment, tables, chairs, and food for thousands of guests throughout the building – with most of the heavy lifting being done by the three freight elevators.
Our resident service technician, Trent Folk, handles the maintenance of the vertical mobility system on-site, making sure that everything is running smoothly for all shows, big or small.
“It’s demanding work and requires careful planning, but it’s really enjoyable,” he says.
He can count on the support of fellow technician James Cox, who oversees the maintenance of our equipment in the city’s original Convention Center building, the Arch, located a block and half away.
Having overseen the change from a big hole in the ground to a stunning 16-floor structure, Mike says there’s a large sense of pride in what he and his team achieved. “It’s great to see it up and running and visitors enjoying their time there. Every time I drive past it, I look up and think, 'We built that!'”