Photo by Gerald Querubin, courtesy Entro
By Peter Saunders
This summer, the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games will take place in Toronto and other parts of Southern Ontario, marking Canada’s largest international multi-sport event to date. Approximately twice the size of Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic Games, the event has involved years of planning and millions of dollars in new investment. When the games are over, however, the purpose of such investment is to ensure a long-term legacy of facilities that will continue to be used by local residents and training athletes.
With that in mind, the 28,986-m2 (312,000-sf) Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre (TPASC) opened in September 2014 as an extension of the University of Toronto’s (U of T’s) Scarborough campus. Co-owned by U of T and Toronto’s municipal government, it represents not just the largest new construction project for the games, but also the largest investment in the history of Canadian amateur sport. It is designed to serve high-level athletes alongside local recreational and community groups and fitness centre members.
TPASC houses the Canadian Sport Institute Ontario (CSIO), two internationally sanctioned Olympic-size 10-lane 50-m (164-ft) long swimming pools, a dive tank, a four-court gymnasium, a rock-climbing wall, conditioning rooms, a 200-m (656-ft) indoor running track, studio spaces and a high-performance athlete testing centre. During the games, the venue will host swimming, diving, synchronized swimming, fencing and the swimming portion of the modern pentathlon. Before and after the games, it is the new home of the university campus’ department of athletics and recreation, which can now expand the number and types of instructional programs open to students, faculty and staff. As such, wayfinding signage will play an important role in guiding visitors through the new facility.
Telling a story
TPASC broke ground in September 2012 and was built by PCL Construction at an estimated cost of $205 million, funded by the university, the city, the Ontario government and the federal government.
“It was built under a public-private partnership (P3) model,” explains Wayne McCutcheon, principal for Entro Communications, a Toronto-based environmental graphic design (EGD) firm that worked on the project. “Our job was to tell a compelling story through the graphics.”
Besides McCutcheon, Entro’s team for the project included principal creative director and member of Sign Media Canada’s editorial advisory board (EAB) Udo Schliemann and designers Gerald Querubin and Raymundo Pavan. They began to work with PCL and NORR Architects in late 2011.
“We’ve never been involved with a project that was built so rapidly,” says McCutcheon. “After six months of design work, there was only one-and-half years to build this huge facility.”
