Rogers Place

Project Description

Rogers Place, the new home of the Edmonton Oilers, is the most modern arena in the NHL. The building is double the size of the team’s old home and features the largest centre-hung high-definition scoreboard in the world.

While the word “big” is used often in describing the completed facility, “fan experience” and “collaboration” were key features of its design and construction. Every aspect of the building was thought out in detail and everything was kept out of view of the fans. Moment frames keep concourses free of obstructions, mechanical units larger than a city bus are hidden away and insulated so as not to be heard, and electrical services have just eight feet of wall space to route conduit from electrical rooms.

“There was great collaboration on the project,” says Serge Dussault, Vice President, CANAM Structures. “We had the luxury of being put on board very early and we were given a period of time to go back into the design to make improvements.

“One challenge we had was the thermal contraction and expansion of steel in the construction phase due to weather. We were able to incorporate some details that would deal with the differences in temperature that no one could predict.”

The arena roof presented another challenge, Dussault says. “In an arena we cannot do it all from the outside. You’d need gigantic cranes and you also don’t have the real estate outside the building.” CANAM, the erector, and the consultant had done many arenas and had enough experience to redesign the construction and arrange the exit of equipment on the project. “We basically redesigned the roof. It was totally different from the original, from 10 or 12 planar trusses to two box trusses. Major early collaboration on the roof made a big difference.”

The architect, engineer, contractor, fabricator, and erector all worked with 3D models to facilitate collaboration. Many components were prefabricated offsite. These all interfaced with the fabricator’s structural steel and required coordination prior to arriving on site. The fabricator’s BIM detected any clash and provided solutions before steel fabrication started.

For this project, the fabricator manufactured 9,000 tons of structural components and created 8,000 drawings. To illustrate the scale of some of the steel components, the truss that sits directly over center ice measures 338 feet long and weighs 400 tons.