Bankers Life Fieldhouse facade
— a fieldhouse that remembers gym shoes on hardwood.
Not only on a wall.
Bankers Life Fieldhouse facade, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The building wears its century the wrong way around. Steel and glass inside, but the face on Pennsylvania Street is brick and Indiana limestone, with arched windows and a clock, a 1920s fieldhouse drawn from memory. It opened in 1999. The name on the sign has changed twice since. The facade has not. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The arena opened on November 6, 1999, on the eastern edge of downtown Indianapolis, between Pennsylvania and Delaware streets. It is home to the Indiana Pacers of the NBA and the Indiana Fever of the WNBA, with a basketball capacity near 17,000. Designed by Ellerbe Becket, the building was conceived as a contemporary echo of Hinkle Fieldhouse, the 1928 Butler University arena that anchors Indiana's basketball memory. The name on the facade has shifted with the title sponsor: Conseco from 1999, Bankers Life from 2011, and Gainbridge from 2021.
The exterior is Indiana limestone and red brick, cut and laid in a way that reads older than it is. The east elevation carries a clock tower and a wall of arched windows over the main entry, framing a glass atrium that fills with afternoon light. The limestone came from the Bedford and Bloomington quarries about seventy miles south, the same beds that face the Empire State Building and the Indiana Statehouse. The intent was continuity with Hinkle, not pastiche.
The fieldhouse hosts Pacers and Fever home games from autumn through spring and summer, along with the Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament in most years and the occasional NCAA round. Entrances open along Pennsylvania Street and through Pacers Square on the south side. The building sits two blocks from the Indianapolis Cultural Trail and a short walk from Monument Circle, so most visitors arrive on foot from a downtown hotel or from one of the garages off Maryland Street.
