National Icon Rediscovered: Hockey Arena for a Sustainable Future

In Canada the hockey arena has served as a place where individuals would not only gather to play hockey but a place for socializing on and off the ice. With today’s high pace, high demand life styles and with the shift in individual’s needs and desires, the arena has lost all of its interactive and engaging traits with the user and observer. The arena offers nothing besides hockey. This thesis will examine the reconsideration of hockey arena design for a sustainable future. Through literatures on past and present arenas designs, sustainability in sports designs and designing sports facilities for communities as a designer we are able to generate new and innovative design responses. Commencing with case studies on sustainable sports design projects, lessons can be learnt to help gather successful design traits, in addition to learning from mistakes of the past. Through a design proposal which implements a new and innovative scheme, and by challenging design through the three issues of sustainability, will aid in demonstrating how by expanding the role of the arena will provide beneficiary needs and desires for a community. This would potentially add to longevity of the infrastructure while increasing its overall building usage. By addressing these problems as a designer we can recreate the arena back into a destination point in which it once was, but now with new flexible, interactive and engaging community and public spaces.