BURST
Three years ago, when a trio of Vancouverites started kicking around the idea of doing something with the Science World dome for the 2026 World Cup, they had no idea whether their vision was even possible.
“At first it was kind of a joke,” recalls Rob Hollingsworth. “Like, ‘Yeah, sure we should wrap the dome as a soccer ball! How the hell are we gonna do that?'”
Sports tournaments thrive on star power, and perhaps none more than the high drama of the World Cup, the quadrennial men’s soccer tournament that opened this month with Vancouver as one of 16 North American host cities.
This year’s edition has already had plenty of stars: Canada’s Jonathan David and Argentina’s Lionel Messi both scored dazzling hat tricks this week and were tied atop the tournament’s scoring race, and Shakira headlined in the opening ceremony (the Colombian singer’s fourth World Cup appearance of the past 20 years, which is more than the Italian men’s team has had during that time).
But one of the biggest stars of the show isn’t an athlete or even a person. It’s a 41-year-old, 17-storey geodesic dome.
The crazy idea of turning Science World’s ball-shaped building into a 40-metre-diameter, 360-degree re-creation of the Adidas Trionda, the 2026 World Cup’s official match ball, has already been a bigger success than its creators hoped, becoming one of the iconic images of Vancouver seen around the world.
A photo of the Science World ball, which has been called “The Beautiful Dome,” ran above the fold on the front page of The Financial Times, the internationally read British newspaper. The New York Times wrote about the ball this week, and its image has been used to illustrate stories about the World Cup in Chinese , German , Brazilian , and Indian outlets, among many other countries.
More than 100 news outlets around the world have already run a Reuters photo of the dome, said Vancouver-based branding expert Trina Notman.
“I really see this image as being the signature image for the World Cup, not just for Vancouver, but for the World Cup among all 16 host cities,” said Notman, principal of West of Ordinary Strategies.
The dome also serves as the landmark for the start of “The Last Mile,” the approach where supporters march on game days north from Science World to B.C. Place stadium.
The concept was “the easy bit,” said Hollingsworth, Science World’s senior director of commercial sales and partnerships
“Just look at the building, and you’re like: ‘Sure, that should be a football. Of course it should.’
“The hard part was the permissions, the funding and the execution.”
Science World’s board of directors had questions, including about what effect strong winds might have on those new panels being installed, Hollingsworth said. “Our board was like: ‘This is supercool, but is the dome going to roll down Terminal Avenue? What’s gonna happen when you put all those panels on there?'”
Engineers ensured the project could be completed, and safely.
The Look Company , an Ontario-based company with international experience creating innovative display projects, was brought on board.
The execution was tricky for a few reasons, chief among them was that Science World did not have what’s known as “as-built drawings” for the dome, which are blueprints showing the exact dimensions and geometry of a building after it is completed, which often vary to some degree from the original design.
They only had access to the old hand-drawn blueprints from before the dome was built for Expo 86, drawings that were “not usable for what we were trying to achieve,” recalled Look Company CEO Jacob Burke.
That meant they needed to create a “digital twin” of the building to learn its precise measurements and dimensions, which they accomplished by scanning the entire structure with drones.
The Look Company’s engineers needed to create 131 distinct panels with slightly different sizes and shapes.
“It fits like a tailored suit, not just something off the shelf,” Burke said. “It’s completely customized.”
The total cost of designing and installing the Beautiful Dome has not been made public, but only a small portion of it was publicly funded: the B.C. government chipped in $150,000.
Most of the project was funded by the tourism industry organization Destination Vancouver, which is not funded by taxpayers, said Destination Vancouver CEO Royce Chwin. The Vancouver Hotel Destination Association also contributed.
“Over the last couple of years, we were basically saving our pennies as a World Cup activation budget, and this was never scoped into it, not at all,” Chwin said.
When the Science World ball idea came across Destination Vancouver’s desk, Chwin says, they liked it so much they scrapped some plans to allocate more of their budget towards the project.
It was a gamble that’s already exceeded expectations, Chwin said. There’s no way Destination Vancouver could afford to buy enough advertising to garner anywhere close to the global exposure the Science World ball has already picked up.
“It will remain an iconic shot for decades to come, so I think we hit a base-clearing hit here,” Chwin said, before correcting himself: “Or a corner kick goal, if you will.”
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