It should come as no surprise that the standout design creation of Vancouver’s Olympic Winter Games was for the only venue where some semblance of civic entrepreneurship was permitted. An oval-shaped arena for speed skating was originally slated to be constructed in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, but an aggressive proposal to host the building from rival suburb Richmond prevailed. Innovative use of wood was a priority for both VANOC and the City of Richmond— in particular the use of small dimension lumber harvested from BC’s huge stock of blue-stained beetle-killed pine. (Since these BC pine beetles are no longer killed by hard winter frosts due to global warming, the province now has unsold mountains of lumber; simultaneously, export markets for wood-framed suburban bungalows in the United States have all but dried up.) Since the structural engineering practice headed by Paul Fast and Gerry Epp is Canada’s leader in engineered wood design, the firm was linked with almost every architectural team shortlisted to design the venue, with Cannon Design emerging the winner.

Fast + Epp’s resulting roof design for the Richmond Olympic Oval is epochal, pointing at the central role sustainably harvested wood will play as the ever-renewable green-construction material of the future. Clever design by the engineers and their linked wood-manufacturing concern StructureCraft solved two enormous design challenges: fashion a large, clear-span structure almost entirely out of timber, and make much of this roof out of small-dimension studs (two-by-fours) salvaged from climate-change-killed British Columbia pine. Architectural in the best possible sense, the Fast + Epp design for the speed skating Oval is ingenious in reconciling its large span with small structural member size.

At StructureCraft’s factory, two-by-four studs were cut into short sections, then the wood was screw-connected through L-shaped metal connecting plates into curving V-sections, which structurally act as long beams. Three of these V-sections were then aligned side-by-side and covered with a capping plywood diaphragm, forming what the engineers call a “Wood Wave Panel.” Once the huge, glulam-laminate wood-beams in a V-configuration were set up across the ice surface to be, cranes lowered the Wood Wave Panels into position as roof elements, then sprinklers, air supply, lighting and other service elements were woven into their latticed forms. The Oval’s roof-curves sweep dramatically upwards along its north elevation, admitting stable light and magnificent mountain views.

This design feature was stymied by VANOC, who insisted on covering up of all windows for the Olympics, worried that outside views would permit “ambush marketing” by companies not on their sponsorship list. The situation was made worse by glare-inducing lighting by Stantec Engineering. Polychrome end-wall patterns and other architectural embellishments devised by associates Cannon Design are nearly as distracting—this building is all about the roof.

The work of Fast + Epp was included in my exhibition Vancouverism: Architecture Builds the City in its showings in London, Paris and Vancouver itself, and it was the highly innovative Richmond roof that surprised and delighted many. Subsequently, engineers Fast + Epp were awarded the 2009 I-Struct-E prize (the equivalent in the world of structural engineering of the Pritzker prize for architecture) for their trail-blazing ideas, deservedly beating out Arup’s design for the Beijing Bird’s Nest Stadium. If the heavy steel members and faux-sculptural mesh of the Arup/Herzog de Meuron design represents the architecture, economies and materiality of the decade past, the elegant green efficiency of Fast + Epp surely represent a bold direction for this new decade. With innovative architecture shunted aside by designaverse Vancouver Olympics organizers, it took the leadership of engineers to produce a design that is truly Olympian. A gold medal to Gerry Epp, Paul Fast and StructureCraft for the Richmond Olympic Oval.