The Free press has a another great artilce on ideas to make over Cobo Center. the Regional authority is open to plans for radical change. The Free Press made a fantasy idea of the news Cobo Center. See it here,
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/m...rams=Id=147561
Link to story here,
http://www.freep.com/article/2009112...so-far-fetched
What should be done with Cobo?

Grand Cobo ideas not so far-fetched

Regional authority is open to plans for radical change
By JOHN GALLAGHER
Free Press columnist
If we were designing Cobo Center from scratch today, it almost certainly would look radically different from the gray warehouse that now hosts Detroit's premier annual auto show.
We'd banish those featureless gray walls that enclose Cobo, replacing them with soaring glass panels that create a sense of arrival and architectural excitement.
Cobo's rooftop parking lot?
We'd replace it with a green living roof with grass, sunflowers, even trees.
Detroit's riverfront may as well not be there for all we can enjoy it from the current Cobo. We'd reconnect Cobo to the riverfront with glass walls and balconies and walkways from Cobo to the RiverWalk.
And the People Mover line that snakes through Cobo now? We'd upgrade the transit options with a rapid rail connector to the city's planned Woodward Avenue line, and maybe throw in rail links at major downtown hotels.
This wish list for Cobo may sound fanciful to many. But it's not so far-fetched, after all.
Everything is on the table
A new regional authority that took over Cobo in September is even now mulling how to spend $280 million allotted for renovations and expansions.
Larry Alexander, chairman of the Detroit Regional Convention Facility Authority, said the authority hopes to gather as many concepts for renovating and expanding Cobo as possible before it makes a decision.
Everything is on the table.
"Depending on how far the dollars will go, sure, why not? Unless we ask the question and go out and see what creativity and ingenuity might create, we don't know," said Alexander, who is also president and chief executive of the Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Cobo, built in 1960 and expanded in 1989, has so many needs today that the money could go in a flash. At the very least, the authority must fix the leaky roofs and mechanical systems and somehow add another 300,000 or so square feet of exhibition space to Cobo's existing 700,000.
Priming the pump
But let's not confuse short-term fixes with the long-term ideal. The plain truth is that Cobo, as it exists today, delivers little of the civic and architectural jolt offered by newer convention centers in Boston, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and New York.
In 2008, then-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick proposed converting Cobo Arena -- the circular building that is part of Cobo Center -- to exhibition space. That's a quick fix to add a lot more space for the North American International Auto Show. But a lot more ideas may bubble up once the authority issues its request for proposals, probably in early 2010.
So today, we try to prime the pump with our own list of suggestions for a new and improved Cobo.
We derived these ideas from talking with various architects and convention center officials.
'Alive with activity'
These suggestions, and the accompanying illustration on the cover of News+Views, are not meant to offer detailed technical programs. Rather, these are big-picture, blue-sky sorts of ideas to generate thinking.
If nothing else, they show that the gap between the current reality and the hoped-for ideal is huge.
First, everyone agrees Cobo needs some more architectural pop.
Most newer centers achieve that with soaring spaces and transparent glass walls, such as the Javits Center in New York and the Boston Convention Center.
And there needs to be a more retail and entertainment options either in the center or immediately adjacent to it.
"The base of this thing should be alive with activity," said Art Smith, design principal at the Southfield architectural firm Harley Ellis Devereaux.
Alexander agreed.
"It has to have a sense of arrival, something appealing to the eye," he said.
Going green
Then, too, the possibilities seem great for employing all the latest energy-saving technology, said Carl Roehling, president and chief executive of the Detroit architectural firm SmithGroup.
"A new Cobo should reflect where our auto industry is going," Roehling said. "It should certainly be sustainable and green, a model of low-energy use. To the extent that we can use renewable technologies and alternative energy technologies, we should certainly do that."
A new convention hotel either attached to Cobo [[as in our illustration) or immediately across the street would be helpful. So would transit connections that go beyond what the People Mover stop at Cobo offers now.
"You look at other cities, and their convention centers are huge civic projects," Smith said. "They're not sort of stuck off to the side. In a lot of respects, Cobo Hall is a huge warehouse sitting on a prime piece of real estate."
Contact JOHN GALLAGHER: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com
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While we're at it


With all due respect to Albert E. Cobo, should the center that bares his name maybe bare someone else's? Or maybe take on a moniker that's not tagged to a famous Detroiter?
Cobo served as mayor of Detroit from 1950 to 1957 -- at the height of the city's postwar redesign of downtown and when the city was at its population peak. He died in office. The convention center was named in his honor.
The name Cobo has its pluses -- short, distinctive, established as a brand.
But are there other names that could serve the city better?