With the demolition of the former Taylor Field in Regina – now better known as a big pile of rubble in Regina – I can’t help but think about how we decide what structures to keep, and what we discard.
Saskatchewan might have been fond of Taylor Field, but it had no hope of staying alive once there was a new Mosaic Stadium. A stadium is simply too large, too expensive, too difficult to maintain to just have as a legacy project. It still feels like a shame to see it go, it stood for so long and was such an integral part of Saskatchewan’s sports history, even though logically, keeping it as a football relic was simply never going to happen.
The odd thing about sports, especially recently, is that it’s something that is often obsessed with history while also determined to get rid of any history it might accidentally acquire, especially in terms of locations where they play. There’s no such thing as an old stadium, even if they’re architecturally interesting.
To be fair to the Roughriders, they stuck with their stadium for 80 years, ancient in the world of sports. For the most part, professional sports arenas look to their 30th birthday with the same degree of trepidation as a character in Logan’s Run. They will all soon disappear.
Look at the NHL. There are currently two arenas built before the 1990s which are still in use, Madison Square Garden in New York City and the Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary. Of the two, Madison Square Garden is the oldest, built in 1968, while the Saddledome is from 1983. It’s also unlikely that Madison Square Garden is going anywhere, both because of expensive recent renovations and because it’s simply too famous now. It’s a legendary venue, both in sports and in art.
The Saddledome, meanwhile, is in that dangerous mid-30s age range, where architecture starts to look old rather than classic. Sure enough, the Calgary Flames want to move into something shiny and new, to the point where they attempted to make it an issue in Calgary’s municipal elections. Going by the election results, Calgary’s voters didn’t want to play that game, but I’m sitting here thinking that Calgary would lose something if they gave into pressure and got a new building.
The Saddledome is dead if the Flames move out, they can’t justify keeping an old arena, just as nobody could justify the continued existence of Taylor Field. But it’s also architecturally interesting – the saddle shape is unique and the roof design was a landmark. It’s historically significant, being the host to the 1988 Olympic Games. It’s the kind of place that would remain a landmark if sports teams were not so adamant about destroying their history in favor of something shiny and new.Â
It’s the second oldest building in the sport, but it also has a lot more architectural value than some of the newer buildings. Decades in the future, nobody is going to say they wished they could see the recently built Little Caesar’s Arena, new home of the Detroit Red Wings, while it was still standing, but I think future generations will say that about the Saddledome when they see it in pictures.
I think that the world would lose an interesting building if they were to lose the Saddledome. This modern rush to have the newest building in your respective sport is doing a lot of harm to our architectural legacy.
