North Surrey Sport & Ice Complex
Engineer-Build
Long Span Roof Structures
This new complex (opened Fall 2019) supports the City of Surrey’s goal of creating healthy communities where people can be active and engaged. The facility features three ice arenas with curved, long-span timber roofs and also provides venues for lacrosse, basketball and trade shows. Additionally, the building features multi-purpose rooms, outdoor activity areas, a fitness center, fitness studios, indoor cycling, and a café.
The building, centrally located near transit, is part of an effort to rejuvenate this up and coming area of North Surrey. Lark Group as design-builder gathered a team including Francl Architecture and StructureCraft to deliver this project. StructureCraft’s scope was to engineer and build the timber roof structure, driving for efficiency while retaining beauty in form and aesthetic. The long span, undulating roofs feature the middle rink as the centerpiece, with clear spans of 43m (140’), showcasing the hybrid timber/steel trusses supporting prefabricated timber panels. The king-posted trusses consist of Glulam top chord, steel rod tension chord and steel pipe web members.
Structural Engineering
Our early engineering efforts used parametric software (Karamba with Rhino/Grasshopper) to optimize the truss design while considering the various architectural, geometrical and fabrication constraints. This optimization significantly reduced truss weight, driving savings in material, labour and crane size. The approach was to design for manufacturing and erection from early in the process, linking the information to automatically update as the overall geometry of the roof was changed throughout design.
Fabrication
The 33 trusses for the three roofs were strung together in halves in the StructureCraft shop, to allow for efficient erection on-site. The double-span roof panels, composed of exposed timber purlins and plywood meeting Heavy Timber requirements, were also quickly prefabricated in the shop, in widths designed to suit the curvature of the roof.
Spruce Glulam was used, allowing the lighter tone of wood to create a beautiful contrast with the black-painted steel webs.
Another constraint considered in design of the trusses was the logistics of trucking these long, deep pieces to site. The roof panels were nested on the truck bed to maximize the number of assemblies shipped per load.
Installation
On site, the truss halves were erected, shored, and spliced together while supported on their ends by steel columns and concrete shear walls. Roof panels were quickly landed, up to 40 per day, and stitched together to form the roof diagram.