This LEED Silver project is a joint-use partnership between the City of Edmonton and the Edmonton Eskimos Football Club, combining football operations, stadium programming and a recreation center. The facility adaptively reuses the 1978 stadium and connects user groups over four stories through a cascading promenade and an innovative approach to materials and transparency. It also has revitalized a vacant stadium space into a 24/7 urban park and community destination.
Three primary masses — a field house, an aquatics center and a gymnasium — respond to the dynamic triangulated geometries of the site and frame a central lobby space.
The building responds to the scale of the stadium and its dynamic nature. The pool massing creates a prow-like gesture, suggesting speed and movement. A southern canopy shields direct light and unifies with the taller field house mass. Cost-effective silver metallic cladding is deeply carved to reveal a tessellated phenolic wood panel system. This rationalizes envelope geometries and frames large openings.
Walls of variegated ceramic frit glazing modulate heat buildup, solar glare and user privacy. The field house, pool and central lobby spaces use clerestory polycarbonate glazing and baffled skylights to reduce artificial lighting, and field house lighting responds to balanced natural daylight levels.
Judge's Comments
The design team has nimbly paid homage to the forms of Edmonton's iconic Commonwealth Stadium with a dramatic modern building.
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Mark Hentze
Very nice duality of light throughout interior spaces. Restrained, effective use of color and materials.
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Burke Cartwright
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Steve Durham
Stephens Family YMCA