A Hybrid Mass-Timber Municipal Ice Arena Offers an Antidote to a Tired Typology

✕

It should come as no surprise that Canada—recent victor of the National Hockey League–hosted 2025 4 Nations Face-Off—is home to more indoor ice rinks than any other country. Nearly 2,900 of them are spread across its 13 provinces and territories—and most of them are, broadly speaking, similar.

The typology has experienced little change over the decades. The result? A prevalence of what Paul Fast, principal at Vancouver-based hcma architecture + design, calls “largely dark and cold steel-joint truss structures designed to get people in and out of a sheet of ice as quickly and practically as possible.”

“Every Canadian feels it’s their God-given right to be able to go and skate on a sheet of ice,” adds Fast. “This has caused a proliferation of arenas that aren’t always very well thought through for the sake of making them as fast and cheap as possible.”

Aeriel view of the facility, located in a dense area of southeast Burnaby. Edmonds Station, part of the Metro Vancouver SkyTrain rapid transit system, is a roughly 15-minute walk away. Photo © Ema Peter

A new public ice arena in the city of Burnaby, just east of Vancouver, aims to shake things up with a fresh take on the indoor rink that foregrounds community.

The hcma-designed Rosemary Brown Recreation Centre broke ground in 2019 and finally opened last spring following a bumpy, prolonged construction process. The 92,000-square-foot complex, anchored by a pair of NHL-sized rinks, employs an innovative hybrid steel-timber roof system and that floods the space with daylight without negatively impacting the ice quality. There’s ample space for players and spectators to linger off the ice, including heated viewing galleries on the building’s second floor. An oversized lobby and rooftop patio, joined by two large, multi-purpose community rooms and an informal children’s play area, help frame the facility as a skate-centric community hub.

The lobby features a skate shop, concessions, and mass-timber elements including glulam beams and columns. Photo © Ema Peter

On the second floor is a warm viewing area and informal play space overlooking the rinks. Photo © Ema Peter

“The problem with ice users is there's always somebody with them off the ice—an entourage, whether it’s a parent with a child or a teenager—that rarely have opportunities to do things, especially the younger kids,” says Fast. “We paid a lot of attention to making this a pleasant experience for people getting up at 5 a.m. to bring their kids to hockey practice.”

Accommodating, inclusive recreation centers that aren’t solely focused on sport is a specialty area for hcma, which is perhaps best known for its cutting-edge aquatic facilities. “We want to leverage these facilities for the best possible use or value for the community itself—that's the starting point we have for these projects,” Fast explains.

Evening view looking into the lobby. Photo © Ema Peter

In 2021 (the year the facility was originally slated to open), city officials voted to name the new center in honor of Rosemary Brown, a local politician who in 1972 became the first Black woman elected to a provincial legislature in Canada. A champion of equal rights, Brown was dedicated to improving services for the “elderly, the disadvantaged, immigrants, and people with disabilities.” Fast says that the city originally called the complex the Rosemary Brown Ice Arena but changed it to “reflect their belief that this was really about more than just ice use, but a broader benefit to the community.” In this case, the community benefitting the most is Southgate City, a master-planned residential development underway in southeast Burnaby’s highly diverse Edmonds neighborhood.

Fittingly, the Rosemary Brown Recreation Centre considers all its potential users. In a departure from standard ice rink design, the facility features high-contrast signage with braille, all gender-neutral bathrooms and changing facilities (a first for Burnaby), wide circulation paths, and seating layouts that accommodates those with mobility challenges. The ice surfaces are also enabled for sledge hockey.

Photos © Ema Peter

Like its program, the center’s design is unorthodox by arena standards. Confined to a tight urban site, the hcma team deviated from the conventional side-by-side or end-to-end arrangement of ice sheets for an L-shaped configuration. This allowed the architects to create an oversized lobby space and a more expansive, interactive viewing experience. What was originally a constraint became what Fast calls a “planning opportunity that allowed the facility to function in a much friendlier way toward the average community member.”

Perhaps the most dramatic departure from windowless ice arena design conventions, is the daylight that pours into the center through clerestories formed by the roof structure’s complex geometry. Twisted 45 degrees diagonally, it allows for perfectly north-facing light while ensuring no direct sunlight hits the ice surfaces. In lieu of cold, utilitarian materials, hcma embraced wood for technical and aesthetic reasons and for its ability to reduce the project’s embodied carbon. In addition to the hybrid timber-steel roof structure, mass timber can be found in the building’s lobby, which features nail-laminated timber (NLT) decking and glulam beams and vertical columns.

Viewing area with glulam and NLT decking system. Photo © Ema Peter

Mass timber, coincidentally, is the primary reason for the Rosemary Brown Recreation Centre’s delayed opening. The Italy-based supplier providing the wood package shut down during the early months of the pandemic, leading to lengthy shipping disruptions. Still, as Fast says, it was worth the wait. The wood helps draw in the community and elevate the project beyond what Canadians have come to expect from ice arenas.

“Wood is such an inviting material,” he says. “It creates an ambience that immediately indicates that this is something special.”

The mass timber timber roof system sits atop a concrete and steel base. Photo © Ema Peter

Click floor plan to enlarge

Click step diagram to enlarge