As pretty as a convention center?

[ellarien]

DSC08265
Originally uploaded by ellarien.

Like airports, convention centers aren't noted for their beauty; their nature inclines them to inhuman scales and vast expanses of institutional blandness. The Hawaii Convention Center, though, is seriously pretty, with its four-story glass-fronted lobby, full of light and palm trees, The meeting room floor, studded with patches of tropical greenery, quietly blends in with the outdoors at the ends of its long halls, and there's a roof garden with an ornamental stream running through it that ends up as an ornamental water-wall inside the building.