Burnin’ love for new Calgary arena

FIRE AND ICE: A rendering shows Scotia Place, the Calgary Flames’ new NHL arena, targeted to open in 2027. (Courtesy HOK)

Calgary to even field with Edmonton

Calgary Flames fans no longer have to burn with envy over their provincial neighbors in Edmonton enjoying the spoils of a modern NHL arena. This week, the Flames and government officials staged the big reveal of the plans for Scotia Place, a new 18,400-seat arena expected to open for the 2027-28 hockey season.

Monday’s ceremonial groundbreaking, which coincided with announcing Scotiabank’s naming-rights deal with the arena, caused the team’s website to crash five minutes after renderings were released publicly, officials with the Flames media relations department told architect Bill Johnson. (Scotiabank also holds naming rights to the Saddledome.

“There’s so many hockey fans up here, that they were crazy to find out about it,” said Johnson, senior vice president and design principal for HOK, which teamed with local architect Dialog to design the venue.

Eight years after Rogers Place opened in Edmonton, a three-hour drive north of Calgary, construction starts by early September on Scotia Place. The total cost runs $870 million (U.S.), which includes infrastructure upgrades. The arena site sits on the edge of the Calgary Stampede grounds, about a block and half from BMO Centre, the city’s convention center that completed a major expansion in June.

The arena project has changed in scope over the past five years since HOK and Dialog were hired as the design team to come up with a building that at the time was thin on public investment and square footage.

Fast forward to 2024 and the budget expanded multifold, with public financing accounting for $515 million and Calgary Sports and Entertainment providing $356 million in private money. Calgary Sports owns the Flames, two minor league hockey teams and an indoor lacrosse team. The Calgary Stampede, the 10-day festival that essentially shuts down the city for two weeks every July, will be another tenant, as it has been at the Saddledome, the Flames’ home since 1983.

“The original project did not have enough (space) on the site for what they wanted to build; everything was tight and compressed, and there was not the same financial commitment from the province of Alberta,” Johnson said. “It was not the right project. The first thing they did when restarting it was take an extra half of a block from the east side of the existing site and we were able to rotate the seating bowl 90 degrees.”

The result was the ability to find additional space to design outdoor plazas and activity zones, according to Johnson. Those gathering spaces extend to four restaurants and the Flames team store on the arena’s west and north sides, all designed as dual facing destinations to help define the edges of the proposed entertainment district, Johnson said.

“The building essentially became a lot more flexible, because the program space was better,” he said. “We didn’t change the seating bowl. The Flames went to Detroit and saw our project there at Little Caesars Arena and they liked the intimacy and scale.”

The arena site is a series of empty parking lots, the loss of which will be replaced by a 450-space parking garage, which was part of the original project, Johnson said.

Unlike the 41-year-old Saddledome and its funky “potato chip roof,” which was built entirely above grade, the construction team of CANA and Mortenson are excavating about 40 feet below ground to build the arena and a 1,000-seat community ice rink at event level that also serves as the Flames’ practice facility. Fans will enter Scotia Place at concourse level. The lower bowl on its own will contain 9,000 seats, Johnson said.

The design theme revolves around the dichotomy of fire and ice, a reflection of the beliefs of the First Nations groups, multiple indigenous tribes which inhabited Calgary for thousands of years and founded the city in 1875. As a result, at the top of the arena are a series of vertical metal fins that project images that look like fire flames when light is projected on them. At night, the exterior will “come alive and dance like fire light,” Johnson said.

At the base of the arena are big white forms that are representative of glaciers and ice flows that make up the landscape in western Canada.

One of the signature design features is the LED ribbon board that weaves inside and outside the arena, starting from the southwest corner, leading patrons to the main lobby, known as the Great Hall. The 460-foot-long screen would be the longest digital display in Canada, Johnson informed the crowd at the groundbreaking.

The massive screen caused the crew at CAA Icon, the owner’s representative, to cringe a bit at the thought of the large price tag tied to the technology, Johnson said

The board has not yet gone out to bid, said Bob Hunter, the city of Calgary’s consultant and former arena and stadium manager in Toronto, and who declined to discuss the budget.

The joke among the development team convening at a reception following the groundbreaking was that if the high cost of the board somehow doesn’t fit into the budget, “there will be a beautiful sign below it that says it’s sponsored by HOK and if HOK won’t do it, then it’ll say sponsored by Bill Johnson,” Hunter said, tongue in cheek.

No joke, Johnson stood his ground on that piece of the project.

“These buildings have become so technologically dependent now, it’s almost like you’re leaving something out if you don’t have some kind of (high profile) digital component,” he said. “It’s our marquee. It can do everything from showing the Rocky Mountains when it’s neutral to promoting events and game play. It reminds me a little bit of Barclays Center, but that (exterior) board is more introverted and this one is extroverted.”

The premium seat inventory will be a mix of 52 suites, 32 loge boxes and terrace tables, 18 theater boxes and three bunker suites. Scotia Place falls in line with the trend of multiple layers of premium products to meet all customers’ budget needs.

For concerts, Calgary will stand equal with Edmonton in offering amenities for fans and touring artists.

The Saddledome’s  deep sloping roofline is tied to rigging capacity of 90,000 pounds with one loading dock, which in today’s touring market, restricts the older arena’s opportunity to book some of the bigger productions on the road.

By comparison, Scotia Place will boast six loading docks and four auxiliary docks, with a rigging grid that can accommodate up 400,000 pounds of equipment, Hunter said.

“That gives you an idea of the way touring shows are now,” he said. “They’re not at that capacity yet, but (the development team) wanted to do it right. It makes a big different to say the least.”

Overall, Calgary has historically been a strong concert market and the dome sells plenty of tickets.

A check of Pollstar data reported from 13 concerts at the Saddledome over the past year shows seven concerts eclipsed seven figures in gross receipts, topped by Morgan Wallen on Sept. 30, producing $2.8 million from 13,556 tickets sold.

Hunter believes artists will play both Scotia Place and Rogers Place in the coming years and government officials feel that way as well.

“The premier of Alberta (Danielle Smith) was on stage with me when we did the groundbreaking and her point was that the province is now a two-stop concert (route),” Johnson said. “The arena strengthens the opportunity here for live events.”