Grand stands

FROM ancient Greece to contemporary Melbourne, sport stadiums are timeless 'places of worship'.

Melbourne's "Rectangular Stadium" is based on the inherent structural efficiencies of the geodesic dome. Picture: James Braund. See more photos

IT'S a city that not only boasts the hottest Grand Slam tennis tournament on Earth (Celsius-wise, at least), the only horse race to stop a nation and a mammoth cricket ground so revered that most people refer to it by a single consonant.

Yet in fulfilling Melbourne’s ambition to unequivocally enter the pantheon of world-class sporting capitals there has always been a missing link. Soon a purpose-built stadium designed for rugby league, rugby union and soccer will turn the dream into reality.

But who could have imagined that the solution, a venue for these most masculine of sports, would end up with a nickname like “Bubbles”, since its superstructure resembles a series of soapsuds floating atop each other? “Omo Stadium” may be as good a name as any, when the multimilllion-dollar naming rights for what has thus far been known as the 31,000-seat Rectangular Stadium are decided.

Whatever it’s ultimately called, the captivating new Rectangular Stadium, designed by Cox Architects & Planners, is a breakthrough design, emblematic of how an imaginatively designed stadium can create a sense of excitement and an instant landmark when those bodies, public and private, demonstrate the courage to commission one.

Due to open on May 7 with a rugby league match between Australia and New Zealand, the $268 million building will be the new, compact home of the elite Melbourne Victory A-League soccer, the Storm NRL rugby league team and the newly created Rebels Super 15 rugby union side in 2011. It will provide Melbourne with a state-of-the-art facility for football codes played on a rectangular-shaped surface, distinct from AFL, which is contested on oval-shaped fields.

Internationally, this is a significant year for stadium design. South Africa, still a developing country clawing its way out of its apartheid past, has built a series of architecturally adventurous venues for the 2010 World Cup of football with Soccer City in Johannesburg, the Cape Town Stadium and Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban chief among them. The design of the 94,700-seat Soccer City - the main World Cup venue for the opening and final games as well as other matches - symbolises African identity with the building’s upgraded exterior fashioned to resemble a traditional African calabash pot. Its form is also designed to pay homage to the massive gold slag heaps in nearby Soweto, a legacy of the city’s formative gold-mining days.

The Durban stadium is notable for its 106m-high grand arch (that holds up the grandstand roof) over which a track carries a funicular SkyCar to convey visitors to an observation platform above the playing surface. On the opposite side of the arch is a Sydney Bridge Climb-style “adventure walk”. Both attractions will afford panoramic views of the seaside city, provide a potential revenue stream for the stadium on non-match days and serve as an internationally recognisable landmark for Durban.

Certainly, cities are crazy for stadiums and they’re often prepared to pay crazy money for them. The global appetite for these ultimate show-off buildings is insatiable, despite their expense and the associated controversy that sometimes ensues about their use, or lack of it, after mass events such as the Olympics and the World Cup.
One critic, urban planning expert Professor Richard Tomlinson, in a recent issue of the University of Melbourne’s Voice journal, condemns the costs of constructing South Africa’s World Cup stadiums in a society where poverty is endemic (but where soccer is the game favoured by the majority black population). Tomlinson writes: “For political reasons, and in Cape Town [for] utter vanity, new stadiums are being constructed … [Cape Town’s] stadium cost close to $US400 million [$440 million] and the stadium seats 68,000, whereas the normal attendance at soccer matches is 5000 people.”

Even though Beijing’s $US450 million Bird’s Nest Stadium has hosted a scant number of events since the 2008 Olympics, its extraordinary design was said to have initially attracted between 20,000 and 30,000 visitors a day. But according to a recent report in The Los Angeles Times, those numbers have drastically declined. The building, which costs $US15 million a year to maintain, may be destined to be one of the Olympics whitest of white elephants though its value as a symbol of the emerging, modern China cannot be underestimated.
Indeed in the book, Stadia: A Design and Development Guide, authors Geraint John, Rod Sheard and Ben Vickery refer to the power of stadiums to create centrepieces for cities. “Television coverage of major events such as the World Cup and the Olympics have brought images of dramatic and often aesthetically memorable stadia into the living rooms of millions of people. The tourism impact of such coverage of a city is immense.”

Philip Cox is the Sydney architect who has designed more stadiums than any other Australian. The list includes Aussie Stadium (originally the Sydney Football Stadium), Canberra Stadium (formerly Bruce Stadium), Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena, the first major tennis centre with a retractable roof, the 2000 Olympics International Aquatic Centre at Sydney’s Olympic Park, Khalifa Stadium in Qatar and now, with his Melbourne team, the Rectangular Stadium. Cox was also involved in the redevelopment of the Melbourne Cricket Ground’s massive Northern Grandstand.

Cox says that when people refer to Beijing today they’re more likely to conjure images of the remarkable, Swiss-designed Bird’s Nest Stadium (officially known as the Beijing National Stadium) than they are of the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace or the Temple of Dawn. He believes the design of Beijing’s Olympic stadium - the world’s largest steel structure - transcends its principal role as a venue for sport.

“The significance of the Bird’s Nest Stadium is that it’s pure sculpture,” says Cox. “[The exterior] has nothing to do with what goes on inside. It’s a civic gesture. It’s simply a very interesting and beautiful building sculpture. And where in the world do you get sculpture of that scale? It is art.” Stadium design, Cox declares, is not just about the “green patch in the middle any more” but about creating “giant theatres” that are for a variety of events, not just sports. They have become, perhaps outside of  airports, architecture’s most grandiose design statements. Arguably, at their best, they are also collectively the world’s most viewed and recognised structures.

Cox believes that stadiums have become the new “places of worship”, particularly in a country  such as ours where sport attains near religious significance.“[Stadium] architecture has to be special and meaningful because otherwise why wouldn’t you just stay home and watch television?” asks Cox. “That’s the issue we face these
days. That’s why the new stadium is all about theatre.

We have to compete with wide-format TV and give people a reason to put down the can of beer, get off the sofa and go to the stadium.”

Patrick Ness, the Melbourne-based design director for Cox Architects & Planners, whose team has driven the Rectangular Stadium project, agrees that the major challenge for the design of stadiums is the competition from television and other sports media. But it’s not enough for a stadium to be aesthetically memorable in order to entice fans from the armchair to the venue. As Ness explains, one of the principal objectives of the new stadium’s design was to ensure than the arena inside delivers “a highly intimate and powerful experience in which atmosphere, proximity to play, sightlines, comfort and weather protection are at a very high level”.

But not every city is willing to invest in innovative design for stadiums. Melbourne, more than any other Australian city, offers a more encouraging contemporary design environment. Says Cox, who is a Sydneysider: “Melbourne has a much more intellectual approach to design than Sydney. Sydney is a maverick, make-a-
quick-buck place. There isn’t the same substance to buildings in Sydney that there is Melbourne.”

Sydney didn’t accept the challenge to build an iconic stadium for its Olympics, settling instead for a sizeable, utilitarian but hardly inspiring structure. Cox, whose own design was overlooked in the competition for the main 2000 Games venues, describes as it as “a nice, safe stadium”. As it eventuated, the Cox blueprint for the Sydney Olympics Stadium project was adapted and used for the Khalifa Stadium in Doha, capital of Qatar, for the Asian Games. The building has attracted considerable acclaim.

Even as it was under construction the Rectangular Stadium garnered praise. Its structural engineers, Arup, won the 2008 Bentley Be Inspired Award in the Innovation in Commercial or Residential Building category. And the general interest, both domestically and internationally, has been building ever since artists’ impressions of it were released.

In a similar fashion to the design of the Australian-conceived Water Cube National Swimming Centre for the Beijing 2008 Olympics, the original concept for the Rectangular Stadium was a collective effort involving the Sydney-based Cox and his Melbourne colleagues, Patrick Ness, Jonathan Gardiner and Philip Rowe, and Tristram Carfrae and Peter Bowtell from Arup.

The Rectangular Stadium punches above its lightweight structure. After all, with a capacity of 31,000, it’s classed as a “boutique stadium”, a dwarf compared to the gargantuan, and less elegant, 100,000-seat MCG, which looms not much more than a punt kick away in the city’s extensive parkland sporting precinct. Ness says the stadium’s design and relatively spectator-small capacity will deliver “an intimate and powerful experience” for fans “in which atmosphere, proximity to play, sightlines, comfort and weather protection are at a very high level”.

At the heart of its design is the “bioframe”, a steel design based on the inherent structural efficiencies of the geodesic dome, allowing 50 per cent less steel than a typical cantilever stadium roof structure. It is a dramatic departure from the more traditional mast-and-cable or cantilever truss stadium. As Ness points out, the building is highly efficient, using one-tenth of the structural steel per spectator seat needed for the Bird’s Nest. The structure’s “skin” facade is formed by a series of large triangular panels composed of glass, metal and louvres.

The effect by day is arresting and by night it could be spell-binding. This is thanks to the inclusion of a multitude of strategically located LED lights positioned in the roof to allow for stunning lighting displays, part of a trend that began with Munich’s 70,000-seat Allianz Arena, built for the World Cup 2006. That arena was designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who also designed the Bird’s Nest Stadium. The most spectacular aspect of the German stadium is the illuminated facade that lights up in a white and blue or red and white pattern, depending on which of the two Munich football teams is playing.

Cox believes that the Bird’s Nest Stadium may be the last of the “extravagant” stadiums. Increasingly, stadiums need to be flexible in terms of not only having the capacity to host sporting fixtures but also other revenue-generating events such as rock concerts. Durban’s World Cup 2010 stadium is a case in point in that it was designed for this year’s festival of football but with possible future Olympics and Commonwealth Games bids also in mind.

London’s 2012 Olympic Stadium will have a capacity of 80,000 during the Games: 25,000 seats in its permanent lower tier and a lightweight steel and concrete upper tier that will hold a further 55,000 spectators. The upper tier can be dismantled after the Games, avoiding the burden of a white elephant stadium (a spectre that still pervades Sydney’s largely under-utilised Olympic Stadium). After the Games, in a city which already has the newly rebuilt 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium, London’s Olympic Stadium can be scaled back and serve as a venue for athletics as well as other sporting, cultural and community events.

It’s a far cry from the economic extravagance and architectural audacity of the Bird’s Nest Stadium though Melbourne’s unique “Omo Stadium” may yet prove that there remains scope for stunning stadium design.

This story is from the April 2010 edition of Wish magazine. Wish is published free with The Australian on the first Friday of each month.