New Montreal soccer stadium earned LEED Gold certification

The new amateur football stadium in St-Michel district, Montreal, has been designed by architects Saucier + Perrotte along with Vancouver’s HCMA.

The Stade de Soccer de Montreal was the winner of a 2011 city design competition which put an emphasis on design excellence and sustainability.

Gilles Saucier, the project’s lead architect, said: “The purpose is an interior soccer field but also a pavilion for people to gather... And that’s interesting, I think. You can do a sports facility with just one way of thinking, or you can consider what a building brings to the community. This is a way of doing a sports facility that is very much something else.”

The stadium is 118,000 square feet and is comprised of a football field that can be divided for use by local youth players.

The building has a wooden structure, built by Quebec fabricators Nordic Structures, which has a lower carbon footprint than steel, and a zinc surface with glass lobbies and walls inside.

The roof’s structure is made of cross-laminated timber – an engineered material made from thin layers of locally-sourced black spruce wood.

The stadium also relies on natural air flow as opposed to an air-conditioning system - one of the features that earned it a LEED Gold certification.

The site on which the stadium is located is being changed into the Complexe Environnemental de Saint-Michel.

By 2023, there will be a 153-hectare park on the site, making it the second-largest park of Montreal after Mont-Royal.