Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Princess Diana celebrated her twenty-second birthday in Edmonton in the summer of 1983, and one of her first stops was a brand-new convention centre burrowed into a river bank. The Edmonton Convention Centre at 9797 Jasper Avenue opened officially on 22 June 1983 after one of the largest soil excavations ever attempted in the province - roughly 12,000 truckloads of earth carved out of Grierson Hill so the building could cascade down the north slope of the North Saskatchewan River valley. Architect James Wensley's design is the story: about 70 per cent of the structure sits underground, its roof literally supporting Jasper Avenue, which was dug up and rebuilt on top of the facility. From street level the centre looks modest; from the river it reveals itself as a ten-storey glass staircase of terraced halls and atriums stepping down the hillside, held in place by Alberta's first permanent tie-back anchors, driven 225 feet into the earth to keep the whole complex from sliding toward the river. Wensley won the Alberta Association of Architects Citation for it in 1983. Inside, escalators descend past man-made waterfalls - inspired, at the suggestion of Edmonton's Italian community, by the Grand Cascade at the Royal Palace of Caserta - to halls big enough to park a Boeing 727. Tina Turner played the building in its first year, and Pearl Jam, Metallica and Guns N' Roses have all worked its ballrooms between the trade shows, conventions and galas that are its bread and butter. From 1997 to the end of 2018 the building carried the name Shaw Conference Centre under a twenty-year naming-rights deal, reverting to Edmonton Convention Centre in 2019. It is operated by Explore Edmonton, the city's destination-marketing agency, and hosts more than 500 events a year, from the Festival of Trees to citizenship ceremonies, with expansions in the 1990s and 2000s adding meeting space and the signature riverside atrium. Visitors get one of the best free views in downtown Edmonton: the tiered glass walls frame the river valley park system from the core to the University of Alberta, and the pedway network links the centre to Jasper Avenue hotels. Its backyard hosted Red Bull Crashed Ice in 2015 and 2018, sending skaters plunging down the very hill the building is anchored into.