SCC vs. OCCC Size Comparison

My two most-visited convention centers are the Seattle Convention Center (Seattle, Washington) and the Orange County Convention Center (Orlando, Florida); both have events that I attend nearly every year.

With the SCC being located in a dense city, it’s very compact, spreading over only a few city blocks (although it makes good use of vertical space). The OCCC, on the other hand, is an enormous, sprawling convention center. I was curious just how big it was relative to the SCC, so I created this map as a size comparison. Since SCC events often spill into neighboring hotels and event venues, I highlighted all of the venues that PAX West 2022 used in addition to the SCC itself.

Map of Seattle, Washington showing PAX West 2022 venues (SCC, Annex, Grand Hyatt, Sheraton, Hyatt Regency), overlaid with the footprint of the Orange County Convention Center of Orlando, Florida.

From this map, we can see just how large the OCCC is. With the eastern edge of the OCCC West Building lined up over the SCC, the west edge stretches almost all the way down to Pike Place market, while the OCCC’s North/South building extends past Denny Way.

Map of the OCCC complex with labeled buildings. Labeled buildings are OCCC North/South, OCCC West, Hilton, Hyatt Regency, Rosen Centre, and Rosen Plaza.

Building layout of the Orange County Convention Center complex

Technical Details

To create this map, I exported my SVG OCCC silhouette to a PNG raster image. With QGIS, I used the Georeferencer tool to add location data to the raster, then converted it back to a vector polygon with the Polygonize tool. Finally, I created a print layout with two maps using an Albers equal area projection at the same scale: Seattle (with street and building data) on the bottom, and Orlando (with just the OCCC polygon and no background) on top. The OCCC map is rotated to align roughly with the Seattle street grid.

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