Dive Brief:
- The NBA’s newest arena has finished construction. On Thursday night, the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, opened its doors to the public for the first time with a concert by singer Bruno Mars.
- An AECOM Hunt and Turner joint venture broke ground on the $2 billion venue in September 2021, and finished construction this month. AECOM also provided designs for the project. The Clippers, who used to share Crypto.com Arena with the Los Angeles Lakers, will take the court this fall.
- The dome features many high-tech amenities, but hiccups caused delays for the “24K Magic” of the night. Due to an issue with facial recognition entry, thousands of fans were stuck outside the venue, delaying the concert on Thursday, ABC 7 reported.
Dive Insight:
For any type of event arena patrons must download a special app and register for an account in order to enter. They can then create a “Game Face ID” that allows them to walk into the venue without scanning a ticket, according to ABC 7.
But technology isn’t the only aspect of the project that makes the Intuit Dome revolutionary, organizers say.
The 17,700-seat venue houses five basketball courts, a practice facility and training center and has an outdoor plaza with two bars, a restaurant and a team store, according to Lenexa, Kansas-based Henderson Engineers, the project’s mechanical engineer. The arena also has the world’s largest “Halo Board,” an oval-shaped, double-sided 4K scoreboard with a screen roughly the size of an acre.
Two megawatts of rooftop solar panels and 11 megawatts of battery storage on site were designed to help the Intuit Dome operate carbon free, according to a release from Henderson. The company claims that the all-electrical venue will produce no pollution from natural gas or other fossil fuels.
Henderson also incorporated sustainable heat pumps, heat recovery chillers, mag-bearing chillers and arena bowl under-seat supply air distribution, which it said is an innovative, efficient system for providing ventilation and air conditioning from underneath the seats as opposed to overhead ducts.
The project secured LEED-Platinum certification, the highest sustainability rating from the U.S. Green Building Council.
The Intuit Dome is slated to host the 2026 NBA All-Star Game, as well as serve as a site for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.