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The Scotiabank Saddledome, crouched on the edge of downtown Calgary like a colossal piece of discarded tack, seems less a building than a geological proposition. Conceived by Graham McCourt Architects for the 1988 Winter Olympics and opened five years prior, it is an artifact from a swaggering, oil-flush epoch when the city’s ambition was measured in concrete and cable. Its defining gesture, an inverse hyperbolic paraboloid roof, is a flourish of structural gymnastics so audacious it almost feels like a dare.¹ The shape, a perfect mathematical saddle, forgoes the utilitarian domes and prosaic boxes of its North American arena brethren, opting instead for a form that is at once alien and deeply, almost mythically, regional. It is the city’s concrete Stetson, a monument not to shelter but to tension itself.

Unlike the placid, compressive honesty of a traditional dome, the Saddledome’s roof is an exercise in pure tensile drama. A massive concrete compression ring, a perimeter of brute force, corrals a delicate web of steel cables strung across the void. These cables, pulled taut into their signature Pringle-chip curve, support the precast concrete roof panels, creating a vast, column-free expanse that was, for its time, a marvel of unobstructed sightlines. The result is an interior experience of unnerving lightness, a space held aloft by what feels like mathematical willpower alone. “It is a structure that announces its own engineering,” wrote architectural theorist Marco Visconti in a 1989 essay on prairie modernism, “a celebration of the forces it so elegantly restrains.”² This structural bravura places it in a lineage with Frei Otto’s gossamer canopies for the 1972 Munich Olympics, yet where Otto’s work was ethereal and ephemeral, Calgary’s version is heavy, permanent, and unapologetically Albertan. It is less a tent than a fossilized stampede.

To understand the Saddledome is to understand the Calgary of the early 1980s, a city supercharged by petrodollars and a frontier triumphalism that saw no contradiction in building a monument to winter sport in a landscape defined by prairie sun. It was the architectural embodiment of the National Energy Program’s backlash—a defiant act of civic becoming. The building was not merely a sports facility; it was a declaration that Calgary had arrived, a place capable of hosting the world and, more importantly, of bending complex engineering to its will. This was the city of the “blue-eyed sheikhs,” and their palace was to be a marvel of the modern age, a crisp white form against the endless cerulean sky. As local historian Jeanette Harkin notes, “The Saddledome was our Eiffel Tower, a structure whose primary function was to be a symbol of itself.”³ It was an assertion of culture in a place often accused of having none, its sophisticated geometry a rebuke to the roughneck caricature.

Yet for all its formal elegance, the building is an urban planning relic, an autotopian island in a sea of asphalt. It sits within the Stampede Grounds, a seasonal precinct of midway rides and agricultural pavilions, but remains fundamentally disconnected from the city’s burgeoning urban core just across the Macleod Trail gulch. Its relationship with its surroundings is one of lordly isolation. It demands you arrive by car, park in its vast, windswept lots, and engage with it on its own terms, after which you are summarily expelled back onto the freeway. This model of the stadium as a monolithic, drive-in object has long since been supplanted by a new orthodoxy of downtown-integrated arenas, structures woven into the pedestrian fabric with condos, restaurants, and retail—the arena as a catalyst for urban life, not a cul-de-sac. “The Saddledome anticipates no lingering, no spontaneous life at its edges,” Visconti observed. “It is a destination, and upon the final buzzer, it becomes a memory.”

Now, four decades after its audacious birth, the concrete Stetson is an aging icon, its once-gleaming futurism ossified into a kind of beloved retro-kitsch. The acoustics, a notorious casualty of its parabolic geometry that sends sound bouncing into a muddy vortex, have frustrated generations of touring musicians. The concourses are narrow, the amenities dated. For years, it has existed in a state of suspended demolition, the subject of protracted and often acrimonious negotiations for its replacement. This elegiac final chapter has recast the building from a symbol of ambition to one of nostalgia. It is the vessel for a city’s collective memories: of the Flames’ 1989 Stanley Cup victory, of the ‘88 Olympics’ Battle of the Brians, of countless concerts where the sound was terrible but the experience was formative.

The impending demise of the Saddledome raises the inevitable question of its legacy. Is it a peerless work of structural art tragically marooned in a parking lot, or a cautionary tale of form triumphing over function and urbanity? The answer, perhaps, is both. It remains a singular architectural achievement, a rare instance of a large-scale public building assuming a shape of pure, unadulterated pleasure. Its failure is not in its own skin, but in its relationship to the city it was meant to crown. In its elegant, soaring, and ultimately isolating form, the Saddledome perfectly captured the beautiful and vexing contradictions of the city it serves: a place of immense sophistication and stubborn provincialism, of soaring vision and a deep-seated attachment to the open road. It is a masterpiece of a paradigm that no longer exists.