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New Century Stadium

The Year 2000 will be celebrated by many spectacular celebrations, exhibitions and galas, yet nothing will overshadow the worldwide sporting event of the Olympics Games to be staged in Sydney, Australia that year. Central to this prestigious event, known as the 2000 Games, will be a main Olympic stadium designed by Bligh Lobb Sports Architecture - a stadium which was conceived, originated, detailed and designed using MicroStation 95.

The design was performed by Bligh Lobb as a competition design for the Australian Stadium 2000 Consortium. This consortium, headed by Multiplex Construction and Hambros Australia drew together a team from across the world to create a stadium that conformed to the unusual technical requirements in place. The specifications included the need for "ecologically sustainable development", as well as the environmental guidelines in place for the Olympic seating needs, and the ability to scale down for conventional uses without structural alterations after the games. And finally, the stadium needed to be attractive and memorable - befitting such an event.

Bligh Lobb is the result of a joint venture between London-based Lobb Partnership and Bligh Voller, a major Australian architectural firm. Bligh Voller has carved out a reputation on such projects as the Brisbane International Terminal, while Lobb Partnership can be described as one of the world’s foremost sports architectural practices. The company’s previous work includes major stand designs in the UK’s Goodwood and Cheltenham racecourses, Silverstone racing circuit, Calgary Stampede in Canada, and the Selangor Turf Club in Kuala Lumpur. This goes alongside current projects for the famous Cardiff Arms Park Stadium and the recently completed Kirklees Football and Rugby Ground, which won the RIBA Building of the Year for 1995.

Lobb Partnership’s success in this area is the result of innovative approaches to all aspects of arenas and stadia. Working within "ideal" parameters for viewing distances and sight lines, the company first created its new approach by designing a prototype stadium with the UK Sports Council in 1985. This ‘Stadium for the Nineties’ conformed not only to the tight UK guidelines for stadia, but also to many international standards, with the advantage of a phased building scheduled to fit budgets. The need for a new approach to stadia was due to several tragic events at football stadiums across Europe, caused by crowd control measures taking precedence over crowd safety.

As traditional stadium design was providing many of the serious problems for crowd safety, Lobb determined new theories to ensure that the event remained intimate and close for spectators, offered easy evacuation, and crowd-control measures, yet still had a pleasing design. "Combining safety with intimacy is a starting point for the Lobb design," wrote Dr. Brian Edwards, Professor of Architecture, University of Huddersfield. (Architect’s Journal Oct. 95.) The company’s development of innovative ideas has not been limited to the designing itself. As Allan Bernau, structural engineer for Kirklees Arena noted, "The Lobb Partnership has been adept at first developing ideas in an abstract sense for the stadia of the future and then finding a client willing to invest...in applying them." This awareness of having to be ahead of the rest of the market has stood the company in good stead when faced with the largest stadium project ever offered - the Olympic Games.

Using MicroStation for 8 years, the company has found it offers an ideal basis for modern stadium design. "MicroStation has really freed up the form of stadia," comments Jay Parrish, director and architect at Lobb Partnership. "Manual design imposed its own limitations - it’s very easy to do a linear design with the same cross-section all the way along, but what about a design where every cross section is different? With some of our designs it could take two to three weeks to manually create typical sections - a useless waste of time. If you do a 3D model, you can work up a cross-section almost immediately by using the hidden line commands on sectional views of the model."

The first challenge in the design brief was to create a stadium which would provide somewhere between 80,000 to 115,000 seats during the Games, which could then be scaled down to between 60,000 to 80,000 in post-Olympic mode. This was required for the additional demand created during such an event as the Olympics, but with the consideration that a stadium holding an excess of 80,000 seats would prove too large and expensive to maintain in the future.

"For the stadium, one of the key factors is creating a good atmosphere and that atmosphere comes from being close to what’s happening," said Parrish. "If you have a stadium for 115,000 it must be bigger than one for 80,000 and therefore less intimate. The whole building and envelope will be substantially bigger, and you have a lot more maintenance eventually. Fortunately, for an Olympic opening ceremony you can be a little further away than if you’re trying to watch football. So we created the stadium with its eventual use in mind, ensuring that the permanent seats were covered, and still left room for the other 40,000 seats, which will take the place of some roofing in Olympic mode."

The sheer size of the stadium meant that there was a lot of possibilities for the roof construction. Although Lobb followed its "usual" idea of arched roof constructions rather than the older-style cantilevered roof, the massive size of the construction meant that a hyperbolic paraboloid roof form could be used.

"It would be very difficult to use that form on a smaller stadium just because the ends of the roof would be too low for such things as football games. The hyperbolic paraboloid, possible in a stadium this size, also brings the benefits of its own structural stiffness rather than being a simple, more flexible surface."

In this form the roof is constantly bending in 3 dimensions, becoming a design feature in itself. Drawing this accurately, though, would have been considerably more difficult without using the 3D abilities within MicroStation 95.

"With the 3D model, and MicroStation B-splines, I can create cross sections that are near impossible to draw manually, and now the whole appeal of our designs is that they offer an interesting plan, form and section. The immediacy of such details also makes the whole project easy to alter and refine - no need to scratch out and start again."

This 3D model is also utilized by the structural engineers as well as the environmental design consultants, who have the ability to work on the live data rather than the less accurate paper drawings. In order to transfer files to other consultants, the company has tried a number of options over the last 8 years. At first it was via 3.5 inch diskettes, which proved too inconsistent for regular use. In 1995, the company moved onto CompuServe, and found its binary transfer abilities met their needs. Now all consultants to the project receive MicroStation files via CompuServe, which, through the use of references and cell files are never much larger than 1 Mbyte file sizes.

The 3D model also has further uses. It is used to create photo-realistic animations and visualizations in MicroStation MasterPiece, and a complete video containing "time-lapse" pieces for sunlight and shadow effects, as well as showing the phased movement of seating following the event, is currently being prepared. The resultant imagery is being used by both the Consortium and the architects for demonstrating the effects of the stadium before construction has even started.

"Obviously with such a huge model, creating the animation and video footage is a highly complex process," commented Hugh Whitehead of Cadventure Ltd., rendering and presentation consultant to Lobb Partnership. "Fortunately, MicroStation MasterPiece has proved to be one of the best output tools for the project. The raytracing is one of the best features, and makes for some stunning imagery in the animations."

Lobb Partnership has used MicroStation since 1989, where it was eagerly adopted as an advanced method for architectural design. The drawing boards were literally thrown away as the company turned to technology for its answers.

"From the day we got our first system we utilized and adapted rapidly to 3D design. We worked on the principle that you give the most valuable tools to the best people - a premise that pays dividends over and over again. Working at a drawing board is totally unnecessary when you can quickly create your designs in 3D and let MicroStation do the rest for you."

Early on in the adoption of MicroStation, Lobb Partnership realized the need for some customization of the product for specific stadia design requirements. Using the MicroStation User Command Language (UCL), an early customization language, Parrish developed utilities which would automatically calculate and draw stadium solutions with multiple tiers including balconies and boxes. While still using this original application, the company is now working on the next generation of stadium design software to be based on the next generation of MicroStation products.

Construction of the Australia Stadium 2000 began in September 1996, with completion set for the summer of 1999, a full year before the 2000 Games. From within, some 115,000 spectators will be able to view and witness the ceremonies live while watched by millions across the world on television. The centerpiece of the event, the stadium, will be easily recognizable as one of the most stunning buildings yet created for an Olympic Games, and one that could never been built without the vision of Bligh Lobb Partnership and MicroStation.

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