“It’s not just a sports building — it’s really going to be the living room of the city”
There are things $926 million can buy that $634 million cannot. As Bill Johnson has developed Calgary’s new arena, that’s included peace of mind.
Two-and-a-half years removed from the previously failed deal to replace the Scotiabank Saddledome, the arena designer says this go-round feels different from the last.
“I mean, it kind of barely fit,” Johnson said.
The intervening years have seen the project sprawl from 6.5 acres to 10 and includes glittery nice-to-haves such as a year-round bar with a patio, community rink and hulking electronic board that stretches inside and outside the arena. The area’s design plans submitted to the city sets aside large outdoor spaces and public art installations on the north and south ends of the arena. Johnson calls the new building “more extroverted.”
That’s only a sliver of the features contained inside and outside the flashy 18,400-person capacity arena some have said resembles a fireplace with its wavy upper exterior and white exterior base, emblematic of planners’ “fire and ice” motif.
Making Scotia Place all-electric too expensive, but being built to eventually transition
Engineering Scotia Place into a climate-friendly arena has been a hot topic in meetings with the city and province — an expensive, low-return project, and one that factored into the previous deal’s collapse.
One of the key sticking points that saw the 2021 deal disintegrate, Calgary Sports and Entertainment Corp. (CSEC) said at the time, were additional costs related to road work and public realm improvements. Fitting the building with solar panels and achieving net-zero emissions by 2035 were among those improvements, which Flames owners said would have cost them about $10 million — an added cost they were unwilling to foot. (CSEC CEO John Bean estimated costs had increased from $550 million to $634 million when the deal dissolved.)
Scotia Place is being constructed with the ability to transition to fully electric power, but it will initially use natural gas for part of its operations because it’s currently too costly for the city to go all-electric, said Bob Hunter, the City of Calgary’s adviser on the centre.
“It was a cost decision . . . We just don’t have the resources right now to do it,” he said, adding CSEC, the city or both parties can make that decision. The city has committed to making Scotia Place carbon neutral by 2050.
The building is also being equipped with 603 solar panels that can deliver 218 megawatt hours of electricity. Scotia Place will be more efficient in the long-term — it’s being built to earn LEED Silver certification — and Hunter said while it’s a necessary endeavour, there are few financial incentives to greening projects like these.
“If you’re a private-sector person and you were looking at it, you’d say, ‘Well, there’s no return on investment,’ ” he said. “If you’re a city and you have a carbon-neutral strategy of where you want to get, then it all makes sense.”
Inside the arena, the ice will be resurfaced using rainwater collected in holding tanks, which will be used for “a multitude of opportunities,” Hunter said. Heating and cooling will be provided by Calgary’s District Energy Centre, the city-owned distribution centre in the East Village, as opposed to building that equipment from scratch.
Arena roof will be able to sustain 400,000 pounds of weight
The roof’s inability to sustain major loads has resulted in many bands and artists bypassing Calgary because their programs require significant roof support. That changes with Scotia Place’s opening, said Susan Darrington, CSEC’s vice-president of building operations. Darrington was hired by CSEC to help spearhead Scotia Place’s opening and was previously general manager at both Rogers Place in Edmonton and Allianz Parque in São Paulo, Brazil.
“When (the Saddledome) was built, you didn’t have Kanye West wanting to sing from a stage that was floating and hung from the roof. You didn’t have Lady Gaga building walkways that were suspended so that she could run up above the crowd,” she said.
The amount of weight able to hang from the roof will approximately quadruple the Saddledome’s capabilities at nearly 400,000 pounds, around the weight of a grown 30-metre-long Antarctic blue whale. The Scotia Place’s new jumbotron will also nest in the top of the building, whereas the current video board at the Saddledome is stuck in place.
Meanwhile, the number of trucks that can unload gear into the building will increase from one to six, she said, meaning Scotia Place will be able to host shows that have more than 40 trucks’ worth of gear — a factor that allows acts to efficiently unload and pack up.
That’s the substance behind the city’s claim that more artists will be inclined to travel north for two stops in Alberta, Darrington said.
“It makes it worth bringing 40 trucks up and over the mountains, and paying for that gas and taking the hit on the Canadian dollar.”
For fans and event-goers, one welcome change will be the sidewalk-level entry into the stadium, a distant cry from the several flights most Saddledome visitors climb to get their tickets scanned. Inside, upper bowl seats will hang over the lower bowl, bringing upper-level fans closer to the action, Darrington said. The sheet of ice will sit 35 feet below street level.
At the concessions, CSEC is devising six to seven “high-end” food concepts that will be facilitated by new cooking areas inside the concourse, which don’t currently exist in the Saddledome, said Ziad Mehio, CSEC vice-president of food and beverage.
That ability gives Flames ownership “a lot more firepower to produce higher-quality food, different types of varieties and really try to tackle everyone’s needs in the building,” Mehio said. (Pocket dogs aren’t going anywhere, Darrington assured.)
Designers are working on a commemorative piece for the Saddledome, details for which are under wraps for now.
As crews prep for excavation to begin in three weeks, Johnson is eager to hear the U.S. industry’s response to Scotia Place’s design. VenuesNow, a U.S. venue industry magazine, headlined its story on Scotia Place “Burnin’ love for new Calgary arena.”
“It really is striving to be a centre for everything and everybody. It’s not just a sports building — it’s really going to be the living room of the city,” he said.
“This one, I think, is kind of special.”