Working at the leading edge of sports building design, Arup has designers and engineers with experience of every kind of sporting facility. These include arenas, stadiums, velodromes, aquatics centres, indoor ice rinks, world-class sporting precincts and community leisure venues.
Also within the firm are teams focused on sports architecture, recognised for their innovative stadium concepts and integrated design. Working together in seamless international teams, Arup offers all the essential ingredients of building design, engineering and business consulting. In this way it can help to design modern sports venues, China’s National Aquatics Center (or "Water Cube") to Munich’s Allianz Arena, to function efficiently, safely and sustainably.
Arup is proud to see the venues that it has helped to design used for major international tournaments; from the Olympics (including the National Stadium or "Bird’s Nest" for Beijing 2008 and venues for Salt Lake City, Sydney and Turin) and the Commonwealth Games, to the FIFA World Cup and the Asian Games.
Sports precincts are more than just a collection of competition venues. Large sites with multiple sport buildings, athletes' accommodation and commercial facilities necessitate a vast infrastructure, with transport and communication systems, roads and bridges, energy and utilities to be integrated into the design.
Solutions for safety and performance
Arup’s innovations in sports buildings have included the design of retractable roofs for stadiums such as Toyota Stadium in Japan and Miller Park in Milwaukee, USA to ensure spectator comfort and greater usability for non-sporting events. The firm’s skills in parametric modelling have pushed ahead the possibilities of sports geometry, as shown in the design of Melbourne, Australia’s Rectangular Pitch Stadium.
Modelling of a different kind has helped to improve access and people movement and ensured crowd safety on match days at venues such as Sydney Olympic Park in Australia and the UK’s City of Manchester Stadium.
Flexibility and sustainability
To be financially and socially viable, sports venues need to be usable for other kinds of events, including concerts. Arup’s specialists in sustainable events management have developed best practice in the field and works on carbon footprinting strategies such as that for the Concert for Diana 2007.
Sports buildings, such as the Lawn Tennis Association Headquarters at Roehampton, UK, require both floodlighting and mechanical heating, ventilation and cooling. The embodied and operational energy demands can be substantial. As designers, Arup can help to minimise these by creating buildings from locally-available or recyclable materials, optimising water recycling and maximising the effectiveness of passive measures to reduce energy.