11,000 tonnes of steel, moving on rails
Rogers Centre (SkyDome)
When it opened in 1989 as SkyDome, Toronto's ballpark was the first stadium anywhere with a fully retractable motorized roof — an 11,000-tonne engineering feat that still opens in about 20 minutes.
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Our sports culture guide covers Rogers Centre as the Blue Jays' home. This page is about the specific engineering feat that made it famous well beyond baseball when it opened.
The world's first retractable roof stadium
SkyDome, as it was originally named, opened June 3, 1989, in front of roughly 50,000 spectators, with entertainment from Alan Thicke, Andrea Martin, Glass Tiger and the Toronto Symphony. Its defining feature — the world's first fully retractable, fully motorized stadium roof — used four panels of steel weighing a combined 11,000 tonnes, moving on rail tracks around the building's rim.
How the roof mechanism actually works
Architect Rod Robbie and structural engineer Michael Allen designed a system where three of the four roof panels move: two central panels slide sideways and stack over the fourth, fixed panel at the building's north end, while the last panel rotates around the building's rim to nest into the stack. The full sequence — opening or closing roughly 345,000 square feet of roof — takes about 20 minutes.
Built fast, then renamed
The stadium was delivered through a design-build contract in just 32 months, with its scope expanding mid-construction to add a hotel, health club, restaurants and one of the first Jumbotron screens of its kind — several rooms in the attached hotel famously look directly out over the playing field. It was renamed Rogers Centre in 2005 after telecom company Rogers Communications bought it.
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Sources
- CBC News — Celebrating 'An Engineering Marvel': Toronto's Iconic SkyDome Opened 30 Years Ago
- EllisDon — Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome)