Say Goodbye to the Mushroom?

This past weekend, the Vancouver Sun ran a series of stories contemplating the future of BC Place Stadium.

Although the recent roof collapse served to focus the public's attention on the aging structure, it turns out that for several months now, provincial and City officials had been considering what to do with BC Place once it's done hosting the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Apparently, insiders expect that the post-Games future of BC Place will be decided within the next year.

So...this leaves us with a few options to consider.

We could, of course, leave the stadium where it is. Renovate it or rebuild it, but continue to use the prime land on which it sits for our city's main sports facility.

Another option is to tear it down and rebuild it elsewhere. Turn the current site over to developers, and let them build more condos, possibly with some office space and maybe a park thrown in.

With this option, the proposed Whitecaps stadium might then come into play, since it would seem to make more sense to build a stadium that both the Whitecaps and Lions can use. However, a 35,000 to 40,000-seat stadium on the Gastown waterfront would probably be too big. Should we have our sports teams build something on the False Creek Flats instead?

A more radical suggestion would be to do what the Montreal Alouettes did - move to a university field. The smaller venue helped bring back that more intimate, old-school feeling to attending CFL matches - they've been selling out games at McGill Stadium ever since.

So how about expanding Thunderbird Stadium, and having the Lions and Whitecaps play there? Such a plan might even provide that added impetus to extend the Millenium Skytrain Line out to the UBC campus, post-2010.

There's all kinds of wild speculation and hypotheticals here, but the point is to throw out some ideas. Should we have two stadiums or one? Should we build a smaller, more intimate playing field on the waterfront, or something larger or more practical on the city's 'back lot'? Or, should we keep BC Place where it is, but rebuild it entirely after the Games?

Postscript: It turns out today's lead story on the front page of the Province is asking the same kind of questions that we are. Click here for the article, which includes comments from Bob Rennie.

Comments

[Gordon Price]

There's a lot of embedded energy in all that concrete. Here's another option:

"How about building an Italian-style hilltown on the bleachers of B.C. Place, with a dense urban fabric, Habitat-like, cascading down both sides of the roofless stadium? In the centre, playing fields, the town square, a great urban space, maybe even a small lake. Narrow lanes wind up to the top, aerial trams go up and over ....

"Surely we can do better than just imploding this sucker and turning out more of the same point-and-podium stuff we already have so much of."

This is part of a post (with picture) you can find on my blog at http://pricetags.wordpress.com/2007/01/11/the-future-of-bc-place/

[Joe Lousa]

I beleive we should keep the stadium. It is a Vancouver Icon, as much as some people hate it. An open air stadium doesn't sit with me, we live in vancouver and it rains here, alot. The only people that complain are the people that do not do to Lions games anyways and blame the dome. The Lions attendance is doing fine and how would the trade shows work in an open environment. Look at how the dome helped the lions win the Western campionship. Noisest stadium in the league. I beleive they should renovate, get a new covering keeping the air supported fabric. Get newer lightning and sound. There have been alot of advancements in those fields in the last 25 years. Sell of the parking next to the stadium for more condos/commercial/bars. replace the surface lots with reduced below grade parking in the new developments. Rennie gets his condos, the public has their D/T stadium.