2025 Award Winners and Nominees
Project Name
Intuit Dome
Description
Intuit Dome in Inglewood, CA is designed to maximize the fan experience and deliver the most intense home-court-advantage for the Los Angeles Clippers. The highly complex new home of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers is a 1.14 million-sf facility that includes an 18,000-seat arena, a state-of-the-art practice and training facility, team business offices, a sunken garden with a lap pool and an indoor/outdoor lobby and terrace for fans. To create an architectural landmark that provides the Clippers with their own home and identity, designers turned the Clipper’s owner Steve Ballmer’s dream of all team functions combined under one roof into an NBA facility like none other. Intuit Dome’s signature roof encompasses the arena and a practice facility/office building, which are separated by an open-air lobby.
The Intuit Dome project also stands as a convincing example of sustainable innovation and community impact. A major goal for Intuit Dome was—in the words of Steve Ballmer—to “create the greenest arena in the NBA.” He challenged the team to reduce embodied and operational carbon emissions throughout the project. This effort achieved LEED Platinum certification—the first NBA arena to do so under LEED v4—and making it a fully electric facility with sufficient solar panels and batteries to power the arena for an entire concert or basketball game. The project’s holistic focus on carbon emissions – both operational and embodied – started early in design and included Whole Building Lifecycle Assessment during design that led to requirements for lower carbon concrete as demonstrated through mix specific Environmental Product Declarations (EPD’s) which were developed and supplied by ready mix suppler and NRMCA member Catalina Pacific.
Project Team
Owner: Los Angeles Clippers
Owner Representative: CAA ICON
Contractor: AECOMHunt – Turner Joint Venture
Concrete Contractor: Largo Concrete
Ready-mix concrete supplier: CalPortland
Architect: AECOM
Structural Engineer of Record: Walter P Moore
Associate Structural Engineer: Labib Funk + Associates
Evidence
Intuit Dome’s aggressive approach to reducing embodied carbon started early in the design process. As part of the project’s LEED Platinum pursuit, project architect AECOM retained project structural engineer Walter P Moore (WPM) to perform Whole Building Lifecycle Assessment (WBLCA) of the project’s core and shell. The WBLCA highlighted both the contribution that ready mix concrete made to the project’s emissions, and the role that concrete mix optimization could have to reducing the project’s embodied carbon.
The design phase WBLCA allowed the design team to include Global Warming Potential (GWP) targets and goals in the project construction documents. The design team also required Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) as a quantitative measure of embodied carbon rather than prescriptively focus on a specific strategy or technology to achieve lower carbon concrete.
At the time of project bidding, EPDs were not as widely available in the southern California market as they are today. However, Intuit Dome’s team not only provided EPDs, but provided product and facility specific EPDs. Catalina’s mix specific EPDs were based on the specific cement EPD of CalPortland’s’ C595 Advancement 1L-HS. This subtle distinction allowed the ready-mix supplier to recognize optimizations not only in concrete mix design but also efficiencies in the cement production. Catalina Pacific worked closely with the concrete contractor, Largo Concrete, Inc., and WPM to ensure structural performance and construction productivity were maintained.
The average embodied carbon of all concrete used in Intuit Dome was reduced by over 20 percent compared to the NRMCA Pacific Southwest benchmarks. This optimization included the use of high quality and denser Orca aggregates, optimized aggregate grading and fly ash as a SCM.
Overall Largo placed over 84,200 cubic yards of lower embodied carbon concrete in 830 pours at the site. This included 350,000sf of slab on grade, 403,000sf of elevated decks, 145,000sf of walls, and 497 columns, some over 32ft tall.
Just prior to Intuit Dome’s 2024 opening California added embodied carbon requirements in the California Green Building Code (CALGreen). While these requirements were neither applicable nor fully developed at the time of design three years ago, Intuit Dome’s concrete mixes are 50 percent lower than the CALGreen embodied carbon thresholds, demonstrating the project’s leadership in reducing embodied carbon.
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