Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/178290
y the time the Toronto Maple Leafs moved to the Air Canada Centre in 1999, it had been 32 years since they'd won a Stanley Cup. Of course, things like that never mattered when it came to illing the 16,307 seats at Maple Leaf Gardens. From 1946 to the day the team left, Toronto's beloved blue and white sold out every game. But after 1999, those same seats were a problem. The poured-in-place concrete seating tiers that rose in every direction from rink level were tied into the exterior walls such that they supported the structure from the inside. Designated a national historic site in 2006, the rectangular, 150-foot-high building's paleyellow brick facade, along with its Art Deco and Art Moderne features, were to be preserved. "And that was the dilemma for prospective buyers: How do you take the insides out without the walls falling down?" says Chris O'Reilly of BBB Architects, one of three architecture irms working on the project. Despite the structural challenge, Loblaws bought the building in 2004 from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE). But a condition of sale limited its partnership opportunities – speci ically, that the space wasn't to host any sports or entertainment that could compete with MLSE's Air Canada Centre or Ricoh Coliseum. So the building lay in waiting until 2009 when MLSE agreed to its use as a small varsity arena and a deal was RENDERINGS COURTESY BBB ARCHITECTS B Maple Leaf Gardens – Ryerson's Mattamy Athletic Centre at the Gardens + Loblaws by Yvan Marston made with nearby Ryerson University whose student population had long ago outgrown the school's existing athletic facilities. (The Ryerson Rams hockey team and the figure skating team currently use the George Bell Arena in the city's west end.) Architectural programming for a re-imagined Maple Leaf Gardens then took two forms. On the ground loor of the structure, Turner Fleischer Architects carved out an 85,000-square-foot 'urban food concept' store for Loblaws with a mezzanine for a Joe Fresh outlet and an LCBO store, all of which opened in November of 2011. The rest of the building will be the Mattamy Athletic Centre at the Gardens, a 220,000-square-foot athletic facility for Ryerson University. Designed by BBB Architects, it includes an NHL-sized rink on the third loor surrounded by a 2,800- Maple Leaf Gardens – Ryerson's Mattamy Athletic Centre at the Gardens + Loblaws p.68-73Maple Leaf.indd 69 seat bowl, a high-performance itness centre and a multi-purpose volleyball and basketball gym, all of which is the result of a $60-million partnership between Loblaws, Ryerson and the federal government (the latter contributing through the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund). To keep the exterior walls from collapsing inwards once the seating tiers were removed, crews erected braces for the columns supporting the east and west walls and built massive trusses that spanned the lengths of north and south elevations and tied into the corner buttresses that support the domed roof's clear-span truss structure. Originally constructed in 1931 with a post-and-beam rectangular concrete frame and slab loor, the inside of the Gardens was sequentially, and 'surgically' gutted all under the watchful sensors of Buttcon Limited's computer monitoring system, which measured the strain on the building, sounding alarms and sending automatic emails when it registered readings beyond the prescribed tolerances. With most of the seating tiers removed, crews went underground to extend the building columns another 15 feet to accommodate Loblaw's underground parking requirements. "To go down 15 feet we had to put in a series of needle beams picking up the entire structure so that we could lower each existing footing the required depth," recalls Barry Burnett, the project's construction manager for general contractor Buttcon Limited. "We did them in pairs, going down 10 feet below the original column to chop off the old footing, pour a new one and join the new column back to the old one," he says. Once they could complete the new APRIL 2012 /69 3/26/12 2:34:23 PM