A brilliant red swoop—the famous checkmark logo—curves right through the bending wall of glass at the entrance to SportChek’s new Robson Street store. The effect is one of motion, as if both swoop and glass are ready to spring forward.
Unquestionably, 788 Robson is the most innovative and stunning site yet for SportChek, Canada’s largest sports clothing and equipment retailer. The airy, wavy, three-storey design would delight the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, considered the pioneer of modern architecture, who declared, “Curves make up the entire universe, the curved universe of Einstein.”
Constructing the FGL Sports brand store certainly involved some new curves in thought and effort. The transformation of 788 Robson from the conventional box design that formerly housed Chapters into the new, 48,000-square-foot store was “one of the more complicated projects we’ve done,” says Ron Tkachuk, president of ELI Contracting (Elias Tkachuk Contracting Ltd.).
ELI had seven months, a standard schedule for the usual stacking-type building projects. But this job, with its dynamic new features in both design and technology, broke all the standard rules—in fact, leaped far ahead of them, as its fluid-motion design suggests.
“The interesting features include the curving canopy that goes through the atrium: a thing of beauty, a feat of very sophisticated construction and fabrication,” says Tkachuk.
But sophistication inevitably comes with challenges, and the new store was no exception. For example, the steel, instead of being straight for easy fitting into 90-degree angles, needed to be curved to fit on the panels. This meant a lot of extra planning and calculation that a conventional job doesn’t involve.
Meeting the deadline was equivalent to the sprint that comes at the end of a marathon, and was accomplished with a mix of determination and sweat by ELI and the team involved.
A good chunk of the incentive was pride, says Tkachuk. His firm, founded in 1994 in Vancouver, has completed over 360 projects, from minor repairs to construction of Superstores. They like challenges. “We have a very experienced construction and management team, and fully understand our clients’ needs. Our focus is to renovate or build with the least disruption to the clients business and customers or tenants.”
ELI is excited to be part of not only “the premiere sporting goods stores in Western Canada,” but the new wave, one might say, of fluid architecture that SportChek’s Robson site reflects.
Tkachuk explains, “This store signals a dramatic shift in sporting good and apparel marketing. Within minutes of arriving the customer knows they are somewhere special, with features including ski repairs, a full-service bicycle repair shop with an elevator exclusively for bicycle delivery to the repair shop and a complete hockey equipment store. There’s GoPro action cameras and Fitbit technology tracking; even a gait analyzer to determine the best shoe for your running stride.”
Past the iconic checkmark, which lights up at night, a concierge welcomes visitors. State-of-the-art digital displays and specialized advisors await to help them find the right products and the right fit.
But the experience isn’t just about shopping. There’s an entertainment factor, such as 3D murals and models and light displays that give the illusions of, variously, a soccer game in progress and ice breaking beneath you. Under glass, a hologrammed Nike running shoe appears about to burst into flames.
Does ELI Contracting look forward to working on other futuristic projects like this one? The poised-for-action glass wall and red swoop at SportChek’s entrance pretty much sum up Tkachuk’s response: “Let’s do it, yes, and do it well!”
