Project:	Las Vegas Convention Center - Building and Plenum As-built
Location:	Las Vegas, Nevada
Client:	HNTB
Owner:	Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority
Awards:	POB Magazine Second Place Winner Of Fourth Annual Highlights In Surveying Project Contest

The world renowned Las Vegas Convention Center was originally built in the 1940's and has since been added on to 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 space 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 facility, the facility will have additional meeting room capacity and improved egress to and from the site.

HNTB is the Master Architect of the project and 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 combined all of the building plans into one. Having tried to piece the existing record drawings together to create an accurate as-built, HNTB 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 would be required.

It was decided that a team of professional surveyors should be hired to document the existing conditions and deliver accurate 2D building floor plans, a unified structural grid system and three dimensional above ceiling plenum models. To complicate matters, the team would only be given three months to complete the task and would be required to do so while the facility remained fully operational.

The team used an arsenal of the latest technologies to accomplish the task including GPS, digital levels, robotic total stations and reflectorless total stations with measurements shot straight into CAD in real-time on site, and HDS laser scanners.