Strolling through the plaza outside of the Calgary Stampede’s BMO Centre expansion during festivals and conventions will, come completion, be an experience for both the eyes and the ears.

On Jan. 29, the Stampede and CMLC unveiled a major milestone towards that audio-visual experience with the centre’s canopy LED lights—all 1,500 of them—finally making the jump from building render into reality.

“With something like a light show, renderings are just never going to do it justice,” said Kerri Souriol, Director of Park Development at the Calgary Stampede.

When the lights are officially unveiled to the public in June, there will be five different pre-set light shows that evoke the 10 days of the Calgary Stampede, alongside iconic western themes like the prairies, water, fire, and the Aurora Borealis.

The public though can get a sneak peak of the lights and what the completed canopy looks like in a video created by CMLC.

Souriol said that the Stampede is continuing to work with partner Eos Lightmedia to develop other possibilities for the lights to complement major events like Calgary Flames games or the Calgary Expo, and as an added placemaking feature for major conventions.

“We’re not opening with all of those because I think they’re going to evolve over time. But we’re excited with the five we’re opening with, and we’re really excited to build on those as we sort of come into collaboration with all of these possibilities for events on park,” she said.

She said that the lights complement the other features in the plaza, including the sculptural work Spirit of Water by internationally renowned artist Gerry Judah.

The lights, said Souriol, would also enhance musical acts on the expansion’s exterior staircase—which will be the performance venue of the Calgary Stampede Showband for the 2024 Calgary Stampede.

“We’re really excited about where this plaza, which is new space two—as I call it softer space than maybe what you would traditionally see on the Midway—how the light show in particular can complement this new stream of programming that we think is going to live in the plaza during [the Stampede],” Souriol said.

Collaboration key to keeping BMO Centre milestones on schedule

Emma Stevens, Director of Communications and External Relations for CMLC, said that the completion of the lights was due to the collaboration between all of the various partners involved in constructing the expansion.

“We have our design team of Stantec-Populous who conceived of the building, and who envisioned this architectural piece in the canopy, and and then you’ve got all of the teams who put it together. We worked with Heavy, who did all of the work on the steel work and who built those 1500, individual lighting soffits that the light could come through, and then work with Eos Lightmedia to put together the lighting program itself,” she said.

“On the project management and construction management side, PCL is our construction manager, and M3 is our project manager here, but we have upwards of 600 people on site every day working on this building to get it to this point.”

Souriol said that work came about from the design philosophy of wanting to create something surprising for visitors.

Each of those soffits had to be designed, she said, to obscure in the daytime and so that they can project light in the nighttime.

“We really wanted to create that sort of dichotomy of not knowing that it’s there during the day and being surprised by it at night. And so that really came through in how we fabricated it, right down to mocking up the size of the hole,” she said.

“We spent a lot of time at Heavy just getting the hole size right. We were drilling into those panels, and taking them outside and saying, ‘you know, OK, can we see it? What are the lights going to look like behind it?’ So it was a lot of hands-on work to get it to look like what we thought it should look like in our minds.”

Stevens said that the lights, and that surprise for visitors, would eventually serve as a welcoming placemaker for the larger Rivers District and Culture and Entertainment District plans extending from 17 Avenue to Stampede Trail and beyond.

“It’s all about connection and gathering in each of these projects individually, but also on the whole. We’re really looking at how we can create moments of connection and play uses to gather,” she said.

“Between the the plaza and the canopy at the BMO Center, the landscaped area around the new Victoria Park/Stampede Station, at Pixel Park or in the pedestrian realm along Stampede Trail, all of these little spaces all come together to create truly an experience. As pedestrians move through the space, there are many places that you could stop and connect and gather and have a conversation or to take in the lights.”

Substantial completion of the project is set for Q2 of 2024, and the entire expansion is set to open to the public in June ahead of the 2024 Calgary Stampede.