Teeter-Totters and Timber: A Stadium from a Toy Store - INTERN

Teeter-Totters and Timber: A Stadium from a Toy Store

This webinar is part of the RAIC 2024 Conference on Architecture, now available to stream!

Topics: Innovation in Materials, Technology and Construction

Length: 1 hour | What's Included: Video, Quiz, and Certificate of Completion 

Called upon to design a track and field grandstand in an escalating cost environment, an architect and engineer discuss the design process, including site selection, a structural optimization strategy for available materials, and the significance of simplicity with respect to connections and material expression, to bring it all together on time and within budget.

Our session reflects in style and content, the same back-and-forth collaboration between Doug Hamming of Stantec Architecture and Chris Mills of Fast+Epp that led to the design outcome for this new community facility. The Bear Creek Park Stadium is a 2,200-seat grandstand and services building designed to host Surrey’s community sports, cultural, and special events. The extensive wooden roofs employ reclaimed lumber as beams and decking, designed as simple, continuous, floating foils to their structurally optimized and expressive undercarriage of concrete and steel.

By the completion of this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand the importance of a collaborative project design culture to design process experience and design outcome.
• Explore the challenges and opportunities in the use of hybrid materials to create an expressive, optimized and elegant structure aligned with cost-efficiency.
• Understand the architectural, engineering and political challenges inherent in the use of re-cycled materials.
• Understand the benefits of mass timber structures and its implications to fire protection, operability, and sustainability.

Subject Matter Experts:

Doug Hamming
Architect ABIC
Senior Principal, Architect, Stantec Architecture Ltd.

Doug has spent a career aligning architecture with an authentic, human-centred, and meaningful experience. It began with several projects for NASA at their visitor experience center in Florida and their Infinity science center in Mississippi. His interests were further realized in the design of the renewed 50,000-seat BC Place, Robert Lee YMCA, and by winning the design competition for the Halifax Naval Memorial Museum “Battle of Atlantic Place,” in Halifax. Doug strongly believes that good, creative, and sustainable design are constructs of collaboration and a genuine interest and understanding of the client. He takes an approach of deconstructing the problem, and then working from within the client’s team to evolve a solution through the lens of: what if we could do it better? Committed to the quality, livability, and sociological sustainability of the urban environment, Doug has an active interest in urban development having served on design panels in his community in Vancouver, bringing a deep understanding of municipal design.

Chris Mills
P.Eng., CEng., MIStructE., MICE
Associate, Structural Engineer, Fast+Epp

Trained in both architecture and structural engineering, Chris is a Professional Engineer with 10+ years of experience and a passion for developing efficient, sustainable, and elegant design solutions. Prior to joining Fast + Epp in 2017, he spent 5 years working with a London-based firm.

Chris is an enthusiastic collaborator and has helped contribute to the success of a series of built projects in North America and Europe. He has had the privilege of working with several notable clients, engineers, architects,   and builders on projects involving a wide variety of materials and means of construction. Some of these high-profile projects include the IStructE HQ   retrofit in London (HBA), the detailed design of a pioneering 10,000 sq mt ferro-cement canopy for the SNF Cultural Center in Athens and the award-winning SFU Stadium in British Columbia.