Go Big and Get It Right

Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre

Project Photos

The Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre (TPASC) is one of the first facilities in Canada to contain two 50-metre pools (a competition pool and an adjustable-depth training pool), as well as a fully equipped, 5-metre-deep dive tank that provides up to eight lanes for practice swimming. This massive complex—the largest single investment in Canadian amateur sport history—also contains a field house that boasts a fitness area, running track, climbing wall and sports medicine clinic, along with a gymnasium large enough to accommodate four basketball courts or six volleyball courts.

The TPASC is the first LEED Gold facility on the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus.

A geothermal system provides 40 per cent of its heating and 99 per cent of its cooling, and a green roof covers 30 per cent of the roof area. The facility also has a significant 530 kW roof-mounted photovoltaic system.

Constructed for the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Parapan | Am Games, the TPASC hosted swimming, diving, fencing, modern pentathlon, sitting volleyball and roller sports events during that international competition. It is located on land jointly owned by the University of Toronto and the City of Toronto, and in legacy mode serves as an athletic centre for both university and community use.

As Infrastructure Ontario’s Master Planning and PDC consultant for Toronto 2015 sports venues, B+H was tasked with proposing ways to ‘right-size’ facilities during and after the Games. The TPASC required 8,500 seats for the Toronto 2015 competition weeks and only 5,000 seats in legacy mode. B+H proposed installing a temporary wall in the aquatics centre, to be removed after the Games and replaced by a permanent wall enclosing a smaller area. The bid-winning consortium adopted this approach.

The consortium also went with our strategy for minimizing soil remediation costs on this brownfield site: excavate the contaminated soil and sink a large portion of the facility into the cavity, thereby avoiding the expense of refilling with clean soil. This newly back-filled volume is thermally stable and highly energy efficient.

The TPASC is the first LEED Gold facility on the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus. A geothermal system provides 40 per cent of its heating and 99 per cent of its cooling, and a green roof covers 30 per cent of the roof area. The facility also has a significant 530 kW roof-mounted photovoltaic system.