Intuitive Vision: LA Clippers’ New Arena Opens

HOME SWEET DOME: The $2 billion, 18,000-capacity Intuit Dome broke ground in 2021 in Inglewood, California. (Courtesy Team)

With Intuit Dome, Steve Ballmer delivers a game changer

The devil’s in the design at Intuit Dome, the Los Angeles Clippers’ new arena. For those with project architect AECOM, the details materialized from texts and phone calls at all hours of the night from team owner Steve Ballmer, the tech billionaire and visionary behind the $2 billion basketball palace.

Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO known for his gregarious personality and high-energy public speaking performances, wanted a basketball-first building: the best possible basketball experience for fans and players of an NBA team that spent 25 years as the third tenant in downtown LA.

As a result, no detail was insignificant for the 18,000-seat arena, cost be damned.

Ballmer has channeled his hoops passions into the Intuit Dome, which sits astride the Hollywood Park development and SoFi Stadium, within sight of the Ballmer-owned Kia Forum, a top concert venue in its own right. 

Intuit Dome is befitting of Ballmer’s aspiration to build a home for what hopes will be an NBA championship team with cutting-edge technologies custom designed to elevate not just fan and player experiences, but also for artist and concertgoers, while raising the bar for the next generation of big-league venues.

Artificial intelligence-based art installations, biometric food and beverage technology, new age locker rooms that wouldn’t look out of place on “Star Trek?” Yes. 

A saltwater rehab pool? An NBA referees lounge? In-seat phone charging? Check. Check. And Check. 

What about a transfixing marvel that is the Halo scoreboard, an opulent VIP lounge from which Clippers players emerge and plush, roomy seating from P1s to the nosebleeds that can measure fan enthusiasm? Yes, all that too.  

Intuit Dome opens this week (Aug. 15) first with a Bruno Mars two-night stint before the Clippers’ season opener in October. And for the first time ever, an arena not yet opened has been awarded an NBA All-Star Game (for the 2026 season) and will also serve as a basketball venue during the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. 

So many of the features of the AECOM-designed arena came from Ballmer and Gillian Zucker, CEO of Halo Sports and Entertainment, parent company of the Clippers and Intuit Dome.

“I’m a software guy,” Ballmer declared in July at the unveiling of the arena’s halo-shaped videoboard, a Daktronics masterpiece that takes center-hungs and the Oculus design in general to the next level, boasting close to 40,000 square feet of digital space in 4K resolution. “Yeah, it’s a big ol’ piece of hardware, but to get it to really zip for us, we had to treat it like a place to program software to make it come alive.”

“Steve would be the first to admit he didn’t have any design skills — he relied on his Clippers vice chairman Dennis Wong to help lead that — but it became a way of testing his ideas during the process,” said Bill Hanway, AECOM’s executive vice president and global sports leader.

Ballmer had a three-word response to what was first proposed by Hanway for the center-hung. 

“Make it bigger,” he said.

The arena’s food and beverage contractor is Levy’s 310 Provisions, a joint venture with the Clippers, branded after the Los Angeles area code, similar to what the concessionaire has done at other sports venues.  

Intuit Dome has all cashless systems, pieced together from multiple vendors, at more than 40 concession stands and grab-and-go markets featuring diverse Angeleno fare including street dogs wrapped in bacon, spicy Korean fried chicken, sushi with surprisingly good powdered soy and churros. Most stands are equipped with kitchens and leave the wide concourses passable, more Ballmer suggestions aimed at making options fresh and fast, team officials said.  The Clippers and 310 ambitiously aim to have fans served and back in their seats in two minutes, Zucker said.  

The team’s practice facilities and locker rooms could be the most luxurious part of Intuit Dome taking up  86,000 square feet and featuring two full courts, strength and conditioning rooms, a training room, recovery room, biometric lab, a player’s and chef’s kitchens, outdoor seating and outdoor sunken garden with natural light and an Olympic-sized saltwater rehab pool. Locker room features plush carpeting, larger semi-private locker space with enough room for players to fit 32 pairs of sneakers.

The same thought has also been applied to the fan experience and engagement, fitting each armrest with a game control pad built into it to keep fans connected with the halo board in keeping with Ballmer’s vision of having fans focused on the game and action in front of them. 

The armrests are also equipped with PixMob LEDs that can turn the seating bowl into a starry night and form patterns section by section or seat by seat. Montreal-based PixMob also outfitted seats at SAP Center in San Jose, California, home of the NHL Sharks.

Intuit Dome’s 120 restrooms and 1,100 urinal or toilers are more than any other NBA arena, with a fan-to-fixture ratio that’s 50% better than average, said Zucker, the Clippers’ one-time president of business operations.

Becky Colwell, general manager at Kia Forum and vice president of music and events at Intuit Dome, was hired from LA’s Greek Theater in 2022.

 “Someone the other day described it as ‘iconic’ and ‘the future’ between the two buildings,” Colwell said. “I think they complement each other versus compete with one another. We have the same booking team managing the calendar, which is a huge help. So we’re presenting both options.”

(Editor’s Note: Extensive coverage is available in the September issue of VenuesNow)