Welcome to one of the most eco-friendly sports venues in the world: the Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers.
Debuting in August, ahead of the NBA’s regular season, the Intuit Dome is an engineering marvel built to meet LEED v.4, with a LEED Platinum target. It features five full-sized basketball courts, an 86,000-square-foot training facility, and a 38,375-square-foot halo-shaped LED board that ensures there are no bad seats in the house.
But the Intuit Dome’s pièce de resistance is its gleaming grid shell façade, a lightweight, open framework, that maximizes natural light and airflow, slashing energy demands.
The Intuit Dome integrates advanced technology and architecture to support a carbon-neutral operation, aligning with California’s ambitious climate goals. That’s due in large part to its airy building envelope, which also provides a different experience for sports fans.
The goal, says Ross Wimer, AECOM’s lead designer on the project, was to blur the lines between indoors and out, helping make occupants feel not so boxed in.
“The way these [sports arenas] are normally done, it’s a very hermetic experience,” Wimer says. “One of the challenges was how do we open this up?”
Let’s take a closer look.
1. The arena uses 100 percent outdoor air. The building relies entirely on fresh outdoor air rather than recirculating stale air. Not only are occupants breathing cleaner air—this was designed during the COVID pandemic, which brought indoor air quality to the fore—but the HVAC system also doesn’t need to work as hard to control indoor temperatures in the arena bowl. And spaces such as the plaza are without air conditioning entirely yet remain comfortable thanks to California’s mild climate. “We were there on some of the hottest days of the summer, and it’s a perfectly comfortable space,” Wimer says.
2. The panels were a great big puzzle. Because geometry varies across the grid shell, no two panels are the same size. The engineering team at AECOM used advanced computer modeling to carefully plan the layout, helping decide where to place each piece to provide maximum shade and control airflow.
3. The grid shell uses three different kinds of panels. To regulate sunlight and temperature inside the building, the Intuit Dome relies on panels made of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), and laminated PTFE. Together, these panels create a protective yet breathable envelope, keeping interior areas dry while maintaining the openness and ventilation that define the dome’s design—yet they all appear uniform. “As you move around the building, it’s very difficult to tell where we changed the material,” Wimer says.
4. The grid shell is seismically isolated. The outer structure can move independently from the main arena because it’s pinned to movement plates to absorb and dissipate the energy from an earthquake. “We had to use a dynamic model to measure how much movement to allow because some of these pieces would move quite a bit,” Wimer says.
5. It glows. The outer shell of the building was designed to make the arena look vibrant and welcoming from the outside. Because the main indoor areas are enclosed and soundproof, the outer spaces can stay open, letting people see the activity inside the arena. The open panels on the exterior also catch light from color-changing LEDs, giving the building a glowing, dynamic appearance that stands out from a distance.
6. The form is inspired by the basketball net. Picture the movement of a basketball passing cleanly through a net: The building’s elliptical shape reflects the arc of a perfect free throw, while the grid shell structure mirrors the interwoven pattern of the net. Swish!
