Buro Happold celebrates at Emirates Stadium
Practice marks 30 years at London’s latest world-class sporting venue – engineered by Buro Happold
Arsenal Football Club’s new Emirates Stadium is hosting a twin celebration for the engineers that helped build it. Tonight Buro Happold celebrates completion of the spectacular 60,000-seat stadium and the first 30 years of the practice. This stunning new landmark for football in the capital is a fitting location for the celebrations, representing the latest thinking in Buro Happold’s many engineering disciplines.
Formed by a partnership of eight in 1976, Buro Happold now employs over 1,300 and has worked on countless innovative engineering projects throughout the built environment and across the world, garnering many awards along the way. Throughout, it has remained true to its core values, established by practice founder Ted Happold, of care, value and elegance.
Emirates Stadium is among the practice’s most recent projects to reach completion, having hosted its first Premiership game on Saturday 19 August with Arsenal’s first home game of the season.
Buro Happold provided a range of multi-disciplinary engineering services as part of the design team with architects HOK Sport.
The brief for Emirates Stadium, just a short walk from the club’s previous 38,000-seat ground at Highbury in north London, was to provide a world class ground; with the best sight lines, playing surface and atmosphere in the Premiership.
Buro Happold’s structural engineering design for the roof plays a large part in meeting these needs. The downward swoop of the roof is not only striking and functional in how it provides unobstructed views and covered seating for all spectators, but it also means the opening over the pitch is as low as possible. This maximises the amount of solid sunlight that reaches the pitch, so helping the grass grow. This was of particular importance to Arsenal as Highbury was renowned for having one of the best playing surfaces in the Premiership, largely thanks to the relatively low height of the south stand.
The downwards sloping roof will also contain some of the crowd noise, which will help boost the atmosphere in the stands, for the benefit of spectators and players alike.
The translucent polycarbonate sections of the inner ring of the roof also play a dual role. While it reduces the harsh shadows on the pitch, making life easier for footballers and television cameras, it also increases light levels for spectators in the higher rows.
The roof covers approximately 26,000m² and is made up of 2,900 tonnes of tubular steel. The longest sections are the primary three-chord trusses, which span the length of the pitch and are 204m long and 15m across at their widest.
The site itself provided challenges for the design team. As well as being a very tight, triangular site, it was formerly home to an industrial estate and waste transfer station for Islington council and so Buro Happold carried out a full environmental impact assessment of the site and supervised the subsequent remediation works.
It is also bounded on two sides by rail and underground lines just seven metres below the surface, providing two more challenges, for access and for location of the foundations. Buro Happold’s bridges team designed two new crossings over the tracks, allowing easy access to public transport and a rapid evacuation route for spectators. The piling for the foundations had to be carefully located so as to not damage underground structures, while providing the necessary structural stability for the stadium.
Buro Happold partner and the project principal Paul Westbury said: “This project has been an amazing opportunity to create a new home for Arsenal FC. While this design preserves some of the best features of their old ground, we’ve delivered a 21st century building that we all believe offers the best football experience in the Premiership.
“From the outset, this incredibly challenging project has required exceptional team work, both from within the various Buro Happold disciplines involved as well as externally, with architect HOK Sport, main contractor Sir Robert McAlpine and the many sub-contractors involved. Appropriately enough, this has been a great team effort!” said Westbury.
Buro Happold’s appointment to Emirates Stadium, in March 2000 along with HOK Sport, was initially for structural engineering although, as the design evolved, so the practice was asked to provide more services – the full list is below.
The stadium was completed within budget and just over two weeks ahead of schedule, in good time for the Dennis Bergkamp testimonial, played on 22 July. This was a test for safety and licensing purposes and saw attendance of 54,000.
Ends
Project team:
Client Arsenal Football Club
Architect HOK Sport
Main contractor Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd
Buro Happold services: structural engineering, civil and geotechnical engineering, bridges and building services engineering, infrastructure, fire engineering, disability design and security consulting services.
Steelwork fabricator Watsons Steel
Buro Happold
Press Office and practice information at www.burohappold.com
Images of the Emirates Stadium are available. Please contact the press office.
Contact:
Neil Wilks
Press officer
Tel +44 (0)1225 321 764
Fax +44 (0)8707 874 148
Mobile +44 (0)7738 574 178
Email neil.wilks@burohappold.com
Buro Happold is a multi-disciplinary international practice of consulting engineers established in 1976 offering civil and structural engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, quantity surveying, building services and environmental engineering, health and safety management, infrastructure and traffic engineering, ground engineering, façade engineering, fire engineering, computational fluid dynamics analysis, disability design consultancy, project management, urban design and a range of specialist CAD services.
