Jacob K. Javits Convention Center

The project was launched in 1979 to reposition New York in the fiercely competitive national trade-show business and to draw development to an underused stretch of Midtown on the Hudson. It went to I. M. Pei & Partners: James Ingo Freed, a partner of Pei, was lead designer, and the New York firm Lewis, Turner Partnership was associate architect. Construction began in 1980; the center was completed in 1986 and its outdoor plaza in 1988. It bears the name of the former New York senator Jacob K. Javits. In 1988 the American Institute of Architects gave it its National Honor Award.

The building was later renovated and enlarged without closing. In the main building, 6,000 panes were replaced with low-emissivity glass; a new roof, including a green roof, was installed, and the interior space frame was repainted. A 110,000-square-foot (about 10,200 m²) expansion was built alongside.

The 1.6-million-square-foot building (about 149,000 m²) brings together two exhibition halls, offices, shops, restaurants and more than a hundred adaptable meeting rooms. All of these spaces are arranged around a huge glazed hall carried by a light-looking space frame: a public concourse 1,000 feet (about 300 m) long, the fifteen-storey "Crystal Palace" and a galleria, extended outdoors by a 1.1-acre (about 4,500 m²) plaza.

The space frame was unusual enough that the owner had the engineering firm WJE review the roof and check it with its own computer analyses; WJE then designed and installed a monitoring system to check that the structure was behaving as predicted.

A convention center, it hosts trade shows and events open to the general public.

The center stretches along Eleventh Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, by the Hudson. You go in for trade shows and events; at other times it is seen from outside.