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Lendlease and Turner win $1.5 billion contract for Javits Center addition

Design-Build

Lendlease and Turner win $1.5 billion contract for Javits Center addition

The long-awaited addition to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center now has a design-build team.

New York’s Empire State Development (ESD) has selected Turner Construction and Lendlease, an Australian company, to design and develop a $1.5 billion expansion of the Javits Center, New York City’s largest events space.

Renovations will add 90,000 square feet of exhibition area, a 55,000-square-foot ballroom, 45,000 square feet of meeting rooms, an outdoor events pavilion that can hold up to 1,500 people, and a 6.75-acre green roof. In all, the new and old buildings will host a combined half-million square feet of exhibition space.

ESD, the state economic development authority, owns the property, which hugs 11th Avenue between West 34th and West 40th streets on Manhattan’s Far West Side.

Crucially, improvements will re-route some 20,000 trucks off surrounding streets each year, a move that is expected to improve traffic and pedestrian flow in the immediate area. Faster loading and unloading will also free up 20 additional days for more events at what is now the United States’ busiest convention center.

When expansion plans were announced last yearGovernor Andrew Cuomo pegged costs at around $1 billion, though later estimates moved that figure higher. The state will pay $1 billion of the total cost, and the rest of the project will be bond-financed.

Tishman Construction (an AECOM subsidiary) is overseeing the first phase of work to ready the site for a new building. That work began in September 2016, though at this time, there’s no set construction timeline for the project overall.

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