Hillcrest Community Centre

The Hillcrest Centre is a community centre with ice hockey, curling rinks, and an aquatics facility, located at Hillcrest Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Construction started in March 2007; it hosted the 2009 World Junior Curling Championships prior to the Olympics. During the 2010 Olympics, it was named the Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre and had a capacity of 6,000 people to host curling at the 2010 Winter Olympics; for the 2010 Paralympics, it hosted the Wheelchair Curling event.

Design

The centre was built to qualify for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Scale (LEED) Gold certification; for example, the centre’s refrigeration plant is designed to heat other areas of the building and the adjacent aquatic centre through the utilization of what is otherwise waste heat from cooling the ice surface. Surrounding ground water will also be collected for use in the facility’s toilets. Smart site selection is key to maintaining the centre’s green footprint; the new facility replaces a much older community complex, with the new curling complex built on a gravel parking lot. Federal (CEAA) environmental assessment review process was also applied to the selection of the site. Trees that were affected during the construction of the venue were moved to other areas of the park, and any land created from the demolition of the old community centre will be turned into community green space during post-Games conversion.

Post Olympics

After the 2010 Olympic games, the centre was converted into a multi-purpose recreation centre that includes a hockey rink, gymnasium, library, eight sheets of curling ice and a lounge for the curlers. Connected to the facility via an indoor concourse will is the Percy Norman Aquatic Centre, which features a leisure tank, a 50m lap pool and an outdoor aquatic area.