It’s always great to hear about new, large-scale construction projects getting underway in a sustainable way. One such is certainly the new stadium that will soon be built for the Forest Green Rovers soccer team in the UK. It will be designed and built by Zaha Hadid Architects, and it will be a low-carbon structure made out of sustainably-sourced wood.
The stadium will be located in the town of Stroud, UK and will be large enough to accommodate up to 5,000 fans. The design of the structure will also allow for increasing this capacity to 10,000 people. This will be achieve by adding extra seating space along the sides once Phase One of the building process is completed. As such, the expansion will not require costly construction work.
The stadium will have the shape of a continuous spectator bowl that will feature a low profile, sweeping curves and a wooden skeleton. Each seat will have a clear sightline to the field, and the closest spectators will be seated just 16 ft (5 m) from the pitch.
This new wooden stadium will be a part of the so-called Ecotricity’s Eco Park development, which is a sports and green tech business park that is set to cover an area of 40 ha (100 ac), and will cost about $125 million to build. Construction of the stadium is set to begin in late 2017 or early 2018, and it will take two years to complete.
This stadium will be the first of its kind constructed entirely of wood. While the use of this sustainable material is commendable, it does present a risk of a devastating fire, while a building of such size could arguably never be considered entirely sustainable, due to the amount of electricity it requires to run. Heating such a structure is also quite a burden on the environment. Yet given the alternative of building it out of concrete, this stadium will still very sustainable.
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