Bright, airy building can help city rise

Center makes south end of downtown cohesive

RALEIGH -- The first thing you notice walking inside Raleigh's new convention center is acres of blue and orange carpet, designed to look like the crisscross interior of a computer chip.

Then the windows. They're green and slanted outward, some of them 56 feet high and 111 feet wide. You can see the top of Raleigh's tallest building, clouds floating past, cars whizzing below -- as though someone drew a picture frame around the skyline.

Then the air. There's so much of it filling the interior that, with a little luck, you could throw a penny from the top escalator and tie your shoe before it hit the floor.

This is what $221 million can buy. On Friday, the city officially opens its half-million- square-foot showpiece -- a controversial replacement for the older, smaller version once voted second place in a Triangle ugliest-building contest.

The new building's sweep and scale are deliberate.

"It's a building that's got to accommodate 10,000 people," said architect Steve Schuster. "So it's got to have a scale where you can breathe in it. When you're in there by yourself, it can be a little overwhelming."

It's not Wake County's biggest public building. The RBC Center tops out at nearly 700,000 square feet.

It's not the most expensive. Raleigh-Durham International Airport's new terminal will cost $570 million.

And in the world of convention centers, Raleigh's is pure bush league. Orlando, Fla.: four times as big. Chicago: five times as big. Las Vegas: six times as big.

It is possible to pass by Raleigh's new gem and sniff at the idea of spending $200 million on a building most people in Raleigh will never visit.

"No," said Linda Tudor, catching a cigarette break from her job at nearby Chick-fil-A. "No, no, no. It ain't all that pretty. Well, it's prettier than the last one. But $200 million is a lot of money."

To be fair, even the nicest convention centers are designed as giant boxes for showing off new motorboats or the latest in vinyl siding, places where out-of-towners shuttle around with name tags and canvas bags full of maps, fact sheets and souvenir coffee mugs.

As a form of architecture, the convention center offers little room for playfulness. There isn't the equivalent of the Sydney Opera House in the bunch. The center in Denver has a rakish tilt to its roof, but even in the red, white and blue glow of the Democratic National Convention, it's a box.

Details relieve the boxiness

Raleigh's box is a bright, airy place that took years to think through.

The place is almost completely lit by natural sunlight during the day, and its showroom floor is completely sunk underground. No one on the downtown sidewalks will see the trucks coming in and out of 14 loading docks buried under Cabarrus Street.

The entrance on Salisbury Street is all granite, limestone and glass -- beige, gray and green -- and on the McDowell Street side, the shimmer wall's giant oak tree covers the otherwise blank bricks.

The old center's inside was featureless and gray. If a seminar was dull, scanning the room wouldn't help you stay awake.

But detailed work accents the new center: an ocean wave pattern on the ballroom ceiling, dark wooden walls, green and blue stained glass. Eventually, the Sir Walter Raleigh statue exiled from Fayetteville Street will stand out front.

Black-and-white portraits of the construction workers will hang from the walls -- a sense of ownership that echoes workers from grander, better-known structures: the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge.

"I can't tell you how many workers took their wives and children on a tour and said, 'I helped build this,' " said John Muter, vice president of Barnhill Contracting.

In a bigger sense, the center helps tie together an end of downtown that has spent decades as an indistinct dead end.

Before construction started, nothing stood at the corner of Cabarrus and Salisbury streets but an empty parking lot with weeds poking through cracks in the asphalt.

Once the digging began in 2005, construction crews bored a hole so deep that a deer once wandered through the barricade and fell to its death.

Now you can walk down the south end of Fayetteville Street to Memorial Auditorium, and glancing to the west, you can see through the convention center's windows nearly to Boylan Heights.

Perhaps no one is happier to see the center complete than Sam Yehia, who owns the nearby Sam & Wally's Eatery and spent the duration of construction with his front door nearly impossible to reach.

"It's beautiful," he said, the view from his restaurant finally cleared.

Few in Wake County will visit the convention center -- not the inside, at least. Crews cleaning the windows on ReachMaster lifts will see it more than the typical taxpayer.

But it represents potential, room to grow, space for Raleigh to climb into a more celebrated league of cities. Empty inside, it acts as a barometer for how the outside world views the Oak City.

All it needs is people.