ICE District is an area of 27 acres in downtown Edmonton,Alberta. It is centered on the new Rogers Place, which acts as the catalyst for adjacent development. The district in its current phase of development includes over 1,300 residences, two office towers totalling over 1.2 million square feet,over 250,000 square feet of retail including restaurants, a grocer, a casino, a four-star hotel, and a new civic plaza.

The overarching goal of the ICE District was to deliver a unique sense of place - it is a district that has its own heart. Its complementary to the bigger city downtown context, but it’s critical success factor was it’s place making – which is different than good design. It's creating a destination within the city, a unique place to meet and hang out in,and a place to get lost in.

Scope of Work

SA+D was the first design consultant involved in the District's inception and worked as Coordinating Master Planning Architect, Design Architect, and Owner Design Representative throughout the development process for over 10 years.

SA+D developed the initial master plan with Katz Group chairman Daryl Katz, in which we placed Rogers Place on its current site and then linked the arena to a public plaza across a major arterial roadway via a large enclosed public gathering space. This enclosed public space then deposited people into a large exterior plaza surrounded by private development of office, commercial, and hospitality. In addition to creating new links into the city’s street grid, all development is connected to public light rail transit and to the city’s speedway system. We developed ICE District's distribution of development density, primary urban design links, and program use.

We collaborated with the developer and the city to help construct new zoning to allow the development to proceed given the unique nature of the District. As development commenced and new opportunities and circumstances presented themselves, we tested these opportunities at a schematic level at the request of the developer. SA+D then acted as Owner Representative to help select and coordinate additional members of our international consultancy team and further refine the master plan with this growing talent pool.

Specifically, we worked to focus the design efforts of HPA, Dialog Architecture, Stantec Architecture, HOK Architects and many other specialty consultants. Each building, interior design, and public realm team received a design brief and then worked with SA+D in terms of aesthetic development prior to review by the developer.

As development progressed, SA+D remained responsible for defining and maintaining the overall ICE District core aesthetic attributes of form, material, colour, signing, public realm, and interface between built form and that public realm with all other design consultancy. We worked directly with the developer to facilitate commercial and residential marketing efforts through the provision of visual material in print and electronic form at many stages of the development process. We also completed focused leasing studies as opportunities arose, worked with the developer to craft the tenant lease design guidelines, and provided tenant design conformance reviews.

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