Ice Hockey Stadium
Turin, Italy
Arata Isozaki & Associates

Arata Isozaki’s ice hockey stadium in turin promotes flexibility and urban regeneration with an ethereal design

© Alessandra Chemollo

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Paul Bennett

Turin, Italy, was ecstatic on being selected host city for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games—until it realized that the only place to hold this event was in a forgotten industrial zone on the southwest edge of town. Although a few interesting remnants of 1930s-era Fascist architecture littered the site, including a municipal stadium and the Torre Maratona, a 147-foot-high Art Deco tower built to signal the stadium, it was mainly a no-man’s-land––hardly a place to accommodate and thrill large crowds, or advertise Turin to the world.

Arata Isozaki won the competition to redesign the entire 43-acre area, including the construction of a new 15,000-seat ice hockey arena, a landscaped plaza, and, initially, the renovation of the existing municipal stadium to serve as a venue for opening and closing ceremonies. This element was later farmed out to an Italian contractor. The Olympics committee wanted something eye-catching and identifiable for the games, while the city needed a building that could easily adapt to different uses in the future.

Isozaki looked to the past for inspiration: specifically, the Palau St. Jordi sports palace, which he designed for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. Like that space, the ice hockey arena in Turin was designed to be completely transformable. The three sections of seats at each end—constructed as light, steel-framed apparatuses with plastic panels and polymer seats—roll out of the way to create a spacious empty hall, whose defining feature becomes an enormous fiberglass-and-sheet-metal roof. Some 450,000 square feet, it rests on a mere eight steel pylons pushed out to the edge. With steel trusses painted gray, and fitted with skylights and gymnasium lights, the warehouselike roof appears to float over the arena.

At the same time that Isozaki was thinking about future concerts and conventions taking place here, he needed to make sure that the space was unmistakably suited for Olympic ice hockey competitions. During the master planning and competition phase, he decided that his arena shouldn’t be any higher than the existing stadium. The entire footprint was excavated to a depth of 23 feet. Most of the subterranean space is staging area for storage, locker rooms, VIP lounges, and the like. But in the center, the arena drops down with four stands of seats and a rink in the middle. The rink can be completely dismantled, and the stands can be pulled back into a 3-foot-deep cavity at the edge of the space—a nifty operation in which the polymer seats flip down, en masse, to create a huge, open space under the entire roof for large-scale conventions and industrial shows. Glass wraps the entire ground floor, while white plastic panels cover concrete interior walls. Along with the restrained gray-to-white color scheme and the 15,000 clear polymer seats, you almost think you are standing in a large igloo.

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our June 2006 issue.
Subscribe to Architectural Record in print, or get Architectural Record digitally

Formal name of Project:
Ice Hockey Stadium

Location:
Turin, Italy

Gross square footage:
462,332 sq. ft.

Total project cost:
$116.3 million

Client:
Agenzia Torino 2006

Architect:
Arata Isozaki & Associates