Rogers Place
We provided structural design and façade engineering services for an 18,500-seat ice hockey arena that is home to the NHL's Edmonton Oilers.
Lead Contact
Project Details
The Oil & The Ice
When the city of Edmonton needed to find a new home for the Edmonton Oilers, the resulting plan centered the arena on a 16-acre site in the middle of the new downtown ICE District development, a mixed-use sports and entertainment complex billed as the largest in Canada. Roger’s Place can host 18,500 fans for a hockey game or open up the ice surface for event space. The complex also includes an additional community ice rink which doubles as the Oiler’s practice space, a pedestrian bridge, above-grade parking and an office building.
We provided structural design, advanced analysis and façade optimization analysis to HOK, PCL and ICON Venue Group for the 1.4-million-square-foot glass-and-steel arena.
Jeff Nash / Edmonton Oilers
Thornton Tomasetti
Highlights
- The arena’s structural system consists of belled caissons, cast-in-place concrete at the event and below-grade parking levels and a steel-framed superstructure above.
- A 1,800-meter winter garden bridge - featuring tall glass walls and ceilings that rise up to 25 meters – is integrated with the arena, with slide bearings and hidden expansion joints located below the bridge at the far side of the roadway.
- Some challenging structural design features include the use of large unbraced column lengths, transfers of major column lines, large irregularly shaped slab openings and occupied floors hung from the long-span roof.
- Our CORE studio team performed computational modeling and surface rationalization so the curvilinear glass façade could be built using cold-bent, quadrangular, insulated glass. We also developed a custom tool that used Kangaroo – a Grasshopper plug-in for form-finding – to speed warpage analysis.
Our team developed a facade rationalization workflow to significantly speed up the development of the complex facade and roof geometries.
Our Team
