Intuit Dome Claims ACEC California Golden State Award

American Council of Engineering Companies, California

Intuit Dome realized owner Steve Ballmer’s vision for the NBA Los Angeles Clippers to play in an iconic venue within a complex that houses all team functions under a single roof. The 18,000-seat arena is the NBA’s most environmentally friendly arena and benefits the Inglewood community year-round. The venue anchors a 1.14 million-square-foot facility including state-of-the-art practice and training facilities, team offices, fan gathering spaces, and indoor and outdoor basketball courts open to the public. The distinctive diagrid shell roof, covered in diamond-shaped ETFE and PTFE fabric panels, is designed to resemble a basketball net, making Intuit Dome stand out from other NBA arenas.

Walter P Moore’s team of structural, enclosure, seismic, and construction engineering specialists blended their expertise to optimize the roof geometry, connections, and panel layouts to achieve the goals of strength, beauty, and practicality. Seismic safety was a concern because the site is 1.25 miles from the Newport-Inglewood Fault.

The team created an elegant and ingenious solution that allows the light diagrid shell to behave independently from the much stiffer main arena structure that supports it during a seismic event. They connected the diagrid shell to the arena roof at its top and then laterally supported it at node points down its height with innovative toggle-brace connections. The toggle-braces provide lateral and gravity support while allowing the shell to “swish like a hula skirt” around the more rigid brace frame structure. Intuit Dome also features an enormous one-of-a-kind “Halo” board, a one-million pound, 360-degree, double-sided video board with retractable end pieces that are suspended from the roof, along with state-of-the-art rigging and catwalk systems that enhance the venue’s capabilities.

Intuit Dome is a fully electric facility with sufficient solar panels and batteries to power the arena for an entire concert or basketball game. It is the first NBA arena to achieve LEED Platinum certification under LEED v4. Walter P Moore reduced embodied carbon in the concrete by over 20 percent by collaborating with the concrete supplier to obtain supply-chain-specific Environmental Produce Declarations for all concrete mixes; as a result, the concrete is 50 percent more energy efficient than required by the California Green Building Code.

The complex opened on budget and three months ahead of schedule in July 2024.