The gymnasium serves as the soul of the sports center buildings. It covers a land of 95,000 m² and owns 18,000 seats and the building area is 83,000 m². The gymnasium is designed and constructed according to the standard governing hosting Olympic event. It's capable of hosting basketball, volleyball, Ping-Pong, badminton, handball, gymnastics, boxing, indoor football, ice sports and NBA events; meanwhile, it also has the function of hosting large cultural entertainment activities. Aside from 15,000 fixed seats, the venue is also equipped with 3,000 retractable seats. The boxes, broadcast room, athletes warming up area, underground parking lot and catering area are all available.

 The architectural design of the gymnasium adopts "suspendome" structure. The roof apex height is 45m, horizontal span is approximately 116m and the longitudinal span is approximately 145.4m. The plane is the irregular eclipse shape. The gymnasium is one of the current world's suspendome projects with the largest span. According to statistics, the gymnasium roof steel structure has more than 30,000 basic components; in order to reach one hundred-year engineering requirement, all seams for the project are level I seams; through computation, the engineering structural components are formed by the combination of more than 100,000 connection plates and nearly 20,000-linear-meter level I seams.

      To adopt diverse new workmanship and technology for energy conservation and emission reduction to the maximum extent is the environmental protection feature of the gymnasium, for example, in terms of the air conditioning system design, the advanced heat supply and refrigeration system is used to minimize energy consumption, such as exhaust air heat recovery, layer air conditioning, seat air intake, secondary return air, low temperature floorboard, radiation warming, etc; besides, the roof adopts standing seal system and intelligent snow melting system to better resolve roof water drainage issue of the large venue.

      The gymnasium can accommodate 18,000 audiences and is one of the largest gymnasiums in terms of audience accommodation. During the ongoing construction of the gymnasium, in order to cope with wind accident, Dalian sports center had conducted stringent simulation test in Harbin Institute of Technology and made 1:10 model; in order to prevent destruction of the sudden typhoon, the aluminum veneer is also added; meanwhile, when the utility power is paralyzed under the acute freezing weather, the generator in the gymnasium cellar will automatically turn on very quickly to meet with the operation requirement of the gymnasium.

      If the ice hockey competition is staged in the gymnasium, it can meet with NBA match requirement in 36 hours. It sounds incredible but feasible. During the ongoing design and construction, the gymnasium is endowed with capability of 36 transformations. The huge four-floor "bucket screen" right high in front of the competition field may have the height adjusted to meet with demand of performance and audience watching the events in an all-round manner.