Intuit Dome

Intuit Dome, the new home to the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA, will be the crown jewel of a $1.8B sports complex on a 26-acre site which includes a practice facility, sports medicine clinic, dining and retail spaces, team offices, a parking garage, and an outdoor plaza complete with concert stage. The site also includes?community basketball courts and gathering spaces.

The most distinguishing feature of Intuit Dome is undoubtably the structural steel diagrid, clad in ETFE and PTFE fabric panels, that spans over the arena on the east side, office space on the west side and an expansive lobby in between. The distinctive building shell is formed from a series of diamond shaped panels reflecting the geometry of a basketball net. The shell also creates a unique indoor-outdoor experience for the fans as they enter the lobby accented with vast expanses of glass and tiered sky-gardens. To maximize the span of the diagrid over the lobby, Walter P Moore designed tree-columns, dubbed so for their form with four branches springing from a single point at the base. The lobby also features a 40 ft wide balcony — supported by a three-dimensional space frame — and a 23ft tall x 190 ft wide videoboard.

The arena will feature a “wall of sound” — a continuous section of seating behind one basket from bottom to top without any suites or tiers — for the Clippers’ ardent basketball fans to create a deafening home-court advantage. Intuit Dome will also showcase a continuous 360-degree, almost full acre-sized videoboard, dubbed the Halo Board, with largest ever double-sided ring of LED displays in an arena setting. The two ends of the Halo Board are designed to be retractable to optimize sightlines during games as well as concerts. Designed to be a flexible and versatile facility to attract world-class tours and national conventions, the arena’s rigging grid can support loads in excess of 500,000 lbs spread over 35,000 square feet.

The office building on the west side is stacked above two full-size, practice courts and is supported on multiple floor trusses that span 145 feet. The sunken garden, a tiered landscaped area on the west side between the at-grade Plaza Level and the below grade Event Level allows ample natural light to reach the practice courts.

Situated less than a mile from San Andreas fault, seismic design and detailing played a significant role in every design feature of the structure. Walter P Moore devised a unique toggle brace connection between the diagrid shell and the building floors which enables the shell to lean on the floors along one axis while allowing free rotations about the other two axes.