The world renowned Las Vegas Convention Center was originally built in the 1950s and has since been added onto several times over the years. Today the convention center is comprised of four main areas: North Hall, Central Hall, South Hall, and the Grand Concourse. Each area contains a variety of spaces including: convention halls, meeting rooms and general support space encompassing over 3.8 million square feet. The Convention Authority decided to undertake an $890 million dollar renovation intended to correct a number of concerns with the existing facility.

There was no route for visitors to take to get from North Hall to South Hall without walking outdoors. The same issue existed for visitors traveling between the monorail station and the convention facility. Upon completion, a new grand concourse will join North Hall to South Hall, a new enclosed pedestrian bridge will join the monorail station to the convention center and the facility will have additional meeting room capacity and improved egress to and from the site.

The project architect was in need of an accurate building and structural grid as-built. While existing record drawings were available, there was no single, unified overall floor plan or structural grid system that combines all of the building plans into one. While attempting to piece together the existing record drawings to create an accurate as-built, the architect discovered that there were dimensional discrepancies of up to eight feet. Due to the enormous size and length of the facility, the process of assembling record drawings, that may have worked on a much smaller facility, revealed that a more accurate method and professional expertise would be required.

ARC was hired to lead an experienced team of professional surveyors, document the existing conditions, and deliver accurate 2D building floor plans, a unified structural grid system, and 3D above ceiling plenum models. Due to lost time, the team had only three months to complete the task and would be required to do so while the facility remained fully operational.

Not only did ARC’s team deliver the completed project on time and on budget, but it did so without any change orders or call-backs. As a result of the timeliness and accuracy of the documents, the client maintained their schedule and expected to save millions of dollars through reduced change orders during construction.
The team used the latest technologies to accomplish the task including GPS, digital levels, HDS laser scanners, and robotic and reflector-less total stations with measurements sent into CAD in real-time on site.