Scotia Place Is Getting Its Exterior. From Scotsman's Hill It Still Looks Like July.

Stampede Park — Scotia Place has started to put its exterior on. You cannot tell from the place most of the city looks at it from.

We walked the block again this afternoon, a month after the July trip. On the west and north sides the building has closed in. There is a continuous tan band of fascia running the top of the bowl now, and below it the wall is going up in white perforated metal panel over printed house wrap. In July that same face was steel frame and green weather wrap. Stand on the sidewalk on the west side and you are looking at something that reads as a finished building for the first time.

Walk around to the east and south and it is still bare green wrap over new structure. There is more green than there was in July, because there is more building to wrap.

That split is the whole story this month, and it has an awkward consequence. Scotsman’s Hill looks at the east face. So does most of the skyline photography of this project, ours included. From up there the new building is the same green box it was four weeks ago, and it will keep looking like that for a while yet. The progress is real. It is just happening on the side nobody is standing on.

The hoarding along the fence line is still doing the talking at street level. “Unmistakably and Unforgettably Calgary.” “Setting the table. We’re cooking up something big.” “We’re in the middle of a line change. Home ice incoming.” CANA’s name is stamped on every concrete barrier holding the banners up, which remains the detail we keep coming back to: CANA built the original Saddledome in 1983, handled the 1995 renovations, ran the 69-day restoration after the 2013 flood, and is now the general contractor, with Mortenson, on the building that replaces it.

There is one more thing worth flagging, with a caveat attached. On the Saddledome’s own lot, east of the building, there is an open trench, lengths of green conduit laid out on the dirt, temporary fencing and an excavator. We do not know what that work is. It is consistent with utility or servicing work, it is fenced and signed the way routine site work is fenced and signed, and it is not evidence that anything is being torn down. We are noting it because it is there and because people will ask, not because we can tell you what it means.

Nothing about the old building itself has changed since July, which is its own kind of news. It opens its farewell season at home on October 1 against Seattle. The last regular season home game on the schedule is April 10 against Vancouver, 42 home dates under the new 84-game format, and whether April 10 is actually the final night depends on where the team finishes. Scotia Place is scheduled to open in the fall of 2027.

We will be back on this block in September, before the season starts. Then in October, Riley Quinn takes it over properly: how the Saddledome got built, what happened inside it, and what Calgary loses when it goes. The first page lands October 15, forty-three years to the day after the doors opened.

Worth watching between now and then: when the cladding turns the corner onto the east face. That is the month this stops looking like a construction site from Scotsman’s Hill, and it is the month the Saddledome starts looking like the older of two buildings instead of the only one.

Independent commentary. Not affiliated with the Calgary Flames or the NHL.