The Beautiful Game

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2000 by Catherine Slessor

Enclosed by a transparent roof, this soccer stadium is a haven of civility and openness.

In partnership since 1983, the French duo of Philippe Chaix and jean-Paul Morel has a reputation for spare, elegant buildings that exploit Modernist qualities of transparency and articulation of structure. Their Archaeology Museum at Vienne (AR Sept 1997), for instance, is a finely-detailed diaphanous box floating on slender steel pilotis above the rural landscape. The museum marked a crucial increase in scale, consolidated by this most recent project for a new football stadium in Amiens, a club in the French First Division. Since France's successful hosting of the World Cup in 1998 (AR July 1998) and victory in this year's European championships, football has enjoyed an increase in popularity, with corresponding improvements in grounds across the country. Here, Chaix & Morel have turned their attention to a stubbornly functional building type that might have proved resistant to their evident sensitivity; happily, this is not the case. Extending the partnership's recent body of work, the Amiens project also d raws on their experience of temporary stage set and exhibition structures that embody the engineering finesse of Jean Prouve.

Modest in size and cost, the stadium lies on the south-west edge of the old city, surrounded by a rural idyll of cornfields and trees. From a distance it resembles a giant greenhouse, rising ethereally above the rolling fields. Seen from close range, the structure has a pleasing clarity of formal and material expression. The pitch is flanked by four shallow, raked tiers of concrete seating for 12000 spectators. On the west side, an additional tier accommodates press and hospitality boxes; eventually the entire stadium may be extended in this way, significantly increasing its capacity. Curved, diaphanous glass roofs are supported at 8m intervals by gently arching steel beams, like great ribcages. Soaring 26m above the pitch, the steel and glass canopies have a surprising delicacy and transparency. Open areas at each corner provide escape routes and ventilation.

The roof structure is simple and legible. Slim, tubular horizontal steel members are fixed at 1 m intervals to curved ribs. The tubes support 10mm thick toughened panels of clear glass. When it rains, water flows off the glass to be discharged into lateral gutters fixed to the base of each roof canopy. The external walls of the seating tiers are painted sky blue, so the glass canopies appear to float, adding to the sense of lightness.

The stadium forms a vast outdoor room both spacious and welcoming, that confounds the traditional typology of football grounds as hermetic cauldrons fermenting tribal animosities. Instead, Chaix & Morel's graceful structure is a haven of civility and openness that shows how an unpromising programme can be transformed into inventive and inspiring architecture.

Architect

Chaix & Morel, Paris

Project team

Philippe Chaix, Jean-Paul Morel,

Remy Van Nieuwenhove,

Anabel Sergent, Benoit Sigros,

Emmanuel Laurent, Laurent Bievelot

Structural engineer

Ingerop

Landscape design

Atelier de Paysages Bruel-Delmar

PhotographsChristian Richters