Western Massachusetts Visitor Center Study

Client: City of Springfield

Site: Springfield, Massachusetts

The Collaborative, Inc. developed a programming plan for the Western Massachusetts Visitor Center. The plan included overall space needs, with divisions of space into areas of emphasis covering various topics. Space needs were based on a projected annual visitation rate of 750,000 visitors. In order to provide supporting data for the programming plan, a survey was completed of other visitor centers that had comparable needs. The State of Texas had recently completed a large project involving seven new visitor centers, several of which had a visitor rate of about 750,000. This exhaustive study provided results within 2% of the total square footage needs estimated for Western Massachusetts and within a 5% variance on the needs for individual areas of emphasis. This reconfirmed the accuracy of the projections provided by tCi and the program was accepted.