Birth of the Saddledome: Shaping The Saddle

Over the course of the preseason, we’re setting up the Farewell Season at the Scotiabank Saddledome with a three-part series on how Calgary’s iconic arena came to be.

In part two, we look at how a Canadian firm with Calgary roots led the design phase of a building that has left an indelible mark on the city’s skyline and sporting history.

The Olympic Coliseum broke ground in July of 1981, but bringing the facility now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome to life involved much more than assembling construction materials and building a structure.

There needed to be consensus on what the arena would look like.

In fact, one of the initial ideas (as reported in the Calgary Herald in July of 1980) was for the design to be similar to the then-Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton, but stakeholders visited several of the newer North American arenas of the era, taking notes on rinks like the Met Center in Minnesota and Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

GEC Architecture - then known as Graham McCourt Architects - was tasked with designing the Coliseum. It was their job to put together plans for a facility that would wow not only NHL fans, but sports enthusiasts tuning in to the 1988 Winter Olympics from around the world.

“While it’s an old saying that there’s nothing really new in architecture, a number of innovative components and a lot of original research went into this building which all add up to it being substantially different than anything in North America and, perhaps, the world,” Graham McCourt Architects senior partner Barry Graham told the Calgary Herald in 1983, shortly before the facility opened with a Battle of Alberta between the Flames and Oilers. “The Saddledome is very attractive, has its own personality and will never be mistaken for any other building. In short, it addresses the 1980s and the future.

“Because the building is for entertainment and recreation, we were concerned that it not look like a warehouse or an anonymous blob and that it fit into Stampede Park. Normally, buildings with a metal skin have a lot of what is known in the profession as ‘metro brown’ in them. In contrast, the Saddledome’s exterior is natural aluminum and inside, it’s filled with bright colours.”

Today, GEC Architecture has its imprint on our city in a wide variety of projects both in and out of the sporting sphere. The Markin MacPhail Centre at WinSport, YMCAs in Rocky Ridge and Quarry Park, and the Ronald McDonald House are just three of the many local projects on their portfolio.

“It's really about being embedded in the community, whether it's sports, community sport, education, housing,” said partner Andrew Tankard. “They're all integral parts of what makes Calgary a great place to live, and certainly the Saddledome is a distinctive part of, of that community. The postcard of Calgary, of course, is the Saddledome in the foreground and the mountains in the background.

“The Saddledome is a really important part of Calgary's identity, and even though you'd say that probably has more to do with the Flames and people's passion for the Flames than it does their passion for architecture, it's still fantastic to be involved in that.”

But what goes into designing a project of this scale together? While the overall vision might be driven by a small group, Tankard explains everyone involved has their defined roles in bringing sketches and blueprints to life.

“It'd be a big team, made up of a lot of people not just within GEC, but a lot of different engineering disciplines; structural engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineers are all part of the team,” he explained. “Then you get into the construction partners, and they all have an influence on the design as well.

“Often in our work liken ourselves to sports teams, but take the lead designer, what is that role? They’re not the captain. The lead designer is probably more like the coach or the general manager. And then on the team, you're going to have people like Dustin Wolf or Mikael Backlund, who all have their role to play at the right moment of the game.”

There were a handful of prior examples of the ‘Dome’s iconic reverse hyperbolic paraboloid structure already in place, too. The Capital Center in Landover, Maryland, the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix and the Scandinavium in Gothenburg, Sweden all provided inspiration. But Calgary’s climate also provided unique challenges for the design team.

The Calgary Herald reported on wind-tunnel tests conducted by the University of Western Ontario during the summer of 1981, bent on determining the pressure and weight wind and snow would place on the concrete roof - the largest of its kind ever built at the time.

Another unique facet of the interior was its adjustable playing surface, required for Olympic ice hockey events. The first two rows of seats were originally retractable, to allow for the wider, Olympic ice surface.

But at its core, the new home of the Flames - and the 1988 Winter Games - needed to be modern. And it needed to be a showpiece for an emerging Canadian city.

Fourty-three years on from its inauguration, it’s safe to say the iconic structure did exactly that.

“There are a lot of factors that go into a building: acoustics, air volume, mechanical systems, camera positions, structural design," Graham told the Calgary Herald in 2008. "We were exploring all the options.

“We did not want to do just another arena barn. The sense of the team was to do something special. It had to be unique in form, character and function.”