[ad_1]
The development of a sport stadium is a project that brings with it funding, design, logistical and planning challenges. Is it possible to provide a service that supports our clients in a way that reduces risk and delivers an enhanced ROI, with a more cost effective and quicker route to completion?
Sport stadia are more than simply a venue where an event is held. They are the beating heart of sport teams and their local communities, often with decades of history, infused with memories of glorious highs and painful lows. A football ground or rugby stadium is a singularly precious place to the fans who visit week in, week out. It is an asset that helps fund the sport club and bind a community by being an increasingly multi-use space and destination venue.
Any development must be handled in a way that respects this and creates a space that will allow a sports team to successfully operate (while bringing growth and community spirit together) and play for many years to come.
The development of a sports stadium is a project that brings with it funding, design, logistical and planning challenges. Sports stadia can be incredibly complex buildings, reliant on many consultants and specialists to deliver both a venue that is safe for mass attendance events, and a rich, memorable and sustainable experience.
This is a task that tests even the most experienced client, project and contractor teams. Clients who wish to redevelop or build a new stadium are often unlikely to have been involved in such a project before – it is, after all, a once in a generation investment.
Aside from a handful of the leading internationally funded top-flight football teams, small to medium sized venues in the UK and continental Europe are far more restricted in their ability to invest in much needed redevelopments, with more modest revenues, attendances and funding options. Establishing the business case early and aligning the plans with the optimum return on investment is therefore key at the inception of a project. With a strong business case and all the main risks dealt with, a wide range of funding options then become available.
FastTrac is a business-led service enabled by our in-house design and analysis tools.
Matthew Birchall, global sports sector leader
So, is it possible to provide a service that supports our clients in a way that reduces risk, supports the complex integration of multiple specialists and ultimately can deliver an enhanced ROI with a more cost effective and quicker route to completion?
We believe that the answer for most new small to medium-sized sport stadia is FastTrac by Buro Happold: a structured, business-led service based on a world class, pre-engineered, configurable stadium design.
Options for developing a new stadium
Worldwide, sport fans are blessed with a plethora of stunning club and national stadiums in which to experience the spectacle they love. Stadia can be sites not only of incredible experiences and media attention, but often also represent world leading design and construction.
However, huge sites to house many thousands of fans for major events such as FIFA, EUFA and championship games are the luxury of the few, and in many cases are unsustainable – both economically and environmentally. While hosting a major event is an exciting spectacle, these requirements and large capacities are not always what the small-to-mid size clubs need to allow an alignment with their business needs and the requirements of their fans.
There is a growing requirement for new modern stadia which are smaller than those required by the elite teams who consistently aspire to be in the Champions League, or those that must meet specific requirements to host international tournaments and games such as the World Cup. Smaller sport stadia also typically generate a more intense atmosphere which can contribute to the sought-after ‘home advantage’, and their uniqueness can also be a source of pride for their local communities.
Delays and deviations
It isn’t uncommon to hear of the development of major sports stadia as projects that stretch on for years longer than originally conceived. Escalating costs, uncertainty in final construction price, alterations to brief and long drawn-out planning processes can all contribute to the prolongation of many stadia development projects: recent estimates suggest that most are overbudget and many are late.
With construction and development risks like this, it is easy for the stadium that finally opens to end up being disconnected from the original business case, with the design decisions often being driven by initial imagery rather than a transformative vision for the club’s future.
Almost every stadium development project becomes a one-off bespoke solution, despite much of the requirements for a football stadium, for example, being the same across multiple venues. Bespoke venues take a long time to design, and cost even more to take to planning and beyond, which is one of the main reasons many new stadium developments stall well before planning and tender.
However, as a new stadium is a once in a generation development, it is understandable that the custodians of the sport club will want their venue to look and feel unique and recognisably their own.
At the other end of the spectrum, a kit-of-parts stadium approach has also struggled to gain traction in many markets due to difficulties in competitive procurement, an inherent lack of flexibility of solutions, and typically a cost-cutting rather than revenue-generating objective. However, the development of prototype venues has enabled solutions that are better co-ordinated, and in many ways more efficient and cost effective than one-off designs.
We believe that there are better ways of doing things in order to give our clients a better service, and our clients agree.
Matthew Birchall, global sports sector leader
But is there another alternative – one that combined the speed, efficiency and low-risk of a prototype stadium, with the traditional procurement, construction and personalised aesthetics of a bespoke solution?
In 2021, Buro Happold engaged with a broad range of sports and entertainment sector clients all over the world, and the feedback was clear – the clients did want this alternative, and Buro Happold were the people to develop it.
A configurable ‘pre-engineered’ stadium
David Hines is a sports architect by trade with over 20 years’ stadium design experience. He is currently leading Buro Happold’s sports and entertainment consultancy team, focusing on venue performance and venue planning.
The team provides stadium compliance and sports design services for architects, supports the integration of the wider engineering offer into the design and management process of stadia projects, as well as straight-to-client work in strategy, planning, economic viability and sustainable legacy use for sports and entertainment venues. FastTrac is the next logical step in an evolutionary design service offer for the team at Buro Happold.
David said, “Not every client wants, or needs, to develop a 60,000 seat FIFA-compliant stadium. Owners of smaller stadia in need of significant redevelopment were becoming increasingly frustrated by the expense and time it took to progress a project to the point where the major risks of planning and cost were confidently dealt with, at which point funding could be more readily obtained.
“Before we began work on the FastTrac service, we were aware of many clients with genuine hesitance to embark on stadium developments, and several developing nations whose reading of the FIFA guidelines provided no relevant support unless embarking on a World Cup or major tournament event.”
A design can go from being totally off the shelf – to something that is bespoke and unique. We consciously placed FastTrac in between the two, while still able to realise the benefits of both.
David Hines, director, sports and entertainment venue consulting
FastTrac sits comfortably between the two extremes of a totally bespoke stadium, and a completely productised turnkey solution, drawing on the benefits of both, for small to medium sized new stadium developments. At this scale of stadium – from 5,000 seats to 30,000 seats – the inner workings of the venue and its associated brief requirements can be more easily rationalised, lending itself to being both modularised and uniquely configurable.
David Hines said, “A design can go from being totally off the shelf – like an iPhone or a McDonalds roadside restaurant for instance – to something that is bespoke and unique, such as a tailored suit or a Tottenham Hotspur stadium. We consciously placed FastTrac in between the two, while still able to realise the benefits of both.
“It rationalises and pre-engineers many of the repeatable and functional stadium elements, with inherent options on capacity and overall form, yet allowing the building to have unique and site-specific design elements worked in further, allowing for identity, brand, site contextual design and integration into the urban grain.
“FastTrac deliberately doesn’t focus on the external aesthetics. It qualifies over 60% of the stadium construction from the inside out. Our approach has been to enable the rapid design of the shell and core of a stadium, from the field of play to the seats, to the concourse and core amenities.
“It creates a framework that allows clubs to look at viability, capacity and capital costs, and for us to work with and support any architect, even those who have never designed a stadium before.”
FastTrac was developed with the needs of clients first, using the input of world-leading expert architects, engineers, consultants, planners and contractors. The service substantially speeds up the process to tender and planning for a new stadium development.
It uses pre-designed elements for the shell and core bowl design and field of play, incorporating all necessary design, engineering, costs and ROI projections at the earliest stages. It relies on a constrained set of design options, allowing for a broad range of variations and catering for all rectangular field sports. FastTrac can be iteratively tested and developed as the brief and business case evolves.
By being based on a modular configurable prototype, it is possible to achieve all the benefits of an off-the-shelf design, but without the downsides. The components are pre-coordinated, adopting an intrinsic hierarchy of design approach that mirrors the construction process and facilitates the incorporation of bespoke fit out and facades, and unique integration into the site and the broader masterplan.
Disrupting the industry to provide a better service
The first phase in the FastTrac service is largely listening to our clients, facilitating the articulation of their vision and aspirations for the development, the range of stakeholders likely to be involved, and the constraints and challenges that they will face. Through a structured consultancy sprint with the client, we can distil and make sense of all this information, play it back to the client representatives and other stakeholder to achieve alignment of purpose and then proceed into translating this into a revenue forecast and brief.
Through a rapid iterative process, we are able to demonstrate how the design changes as we refine the brief and the revenue forecasts as we hone in on the solution the club wants to take forward.
The process through viability and towards planning and tender is substantially streamlined from this point compared to the legacy ways of working, typically achieving savings of at least 50% in terms of cost and time. We can proceed confidently because the majority of the design work has already been done and validated against the business plan. This increased confidence opens up a broad range of funding options which we can also help facilitate at this point.
Buro Happold lead the whole process, integrating the input of expert engineers, architects, cost consultants, project managers, hospitality consultants, planning consultants and contractors.
Matthew Birchall is a partner at Buro Happold and the global sports sector leader. He said, “FastTrac is a business-led service enabled by our in-house design and analysis tools. It is a means of getting clients to planning and tender quicker and more economically – and with a better projected return on investment – than is otherwise possible.
“This is disruptive to the industry – and to some extent ourselves – but it is a disruption that is long overdue. We believe that there are better ways of doing things in order to give our clients a better service, and our clients agree.”
A service powered by the application of technology
The FastTrac service is enabled by the state-of-the-art technological analysis and design engines developed in-house by Buro Happold. These engines make the process of designing the shell and core of a new stadium almost instantaneous, thereby creating the time and space in a project to iteratively test multiple solutions with the client as the brief and business case are refined and developed.
The key has been to link the design solutions to the brief to the business case, thereby enabling us to make sense of an otherwise bewilderingly complex system for our clients.
The modular versions we have come up with are the best design that works across a wide range of options and different sport use – that is the key.
David Hines, director, sports and entertainment venue consulting
Underpinning the evidence-based design is the ability to benchmark the stadium against the most extensive venue database in the world. An appropriately high-performing stadium can therefore be efficiently delivered, with optimum solutions for view, crowd flow, atmosphere, hospitality, technology, inclusivity and sustainability baked in.
Although significant use has been made of parametric tools in the initial development of the design engines, a process akin to artificial intelligence has been adopted to discretise the input and output into the most meaningful solution subsets, massively increasing the speed and performance of the system.
How has FastTrac been developed?
Precedents for existing processes and venues were important in the design development of FastTrac. David Hines and his team gathered a large amount of data from a multitude of venues over the past 15 years ranging up to the 35,000-seat capacity. Along with the Buro Happold Venue Performance Rating database of almost 100 global stadiums, they built extensive tables of reference for everything from distances around the field of play, to numbers of seats in general admission and hospitality, to number of typical floors, vomitories and access, player areas and changing rooms, to the revenue-generating commercial offers including club shops or hotels.
David Hines said, “The modular versions we have come up with are the best design that works across a wide range of options and different sport use – that is the key. This was important because it allowed us to identify the most cost effective and efficient stadium while still maintaining design options – and we couldn’t do that without qualifying it against existing stadiums and current trends. The work also aligns neatly to the new 2022 FIFA guidelines, which are now starting to address the need and recognising standards and practice for the smaller sized venues.’’
Support for a once in a lifetime project
Matthew Birchall knows that the service and guidance Buro Happold provide is uniquely positioned to deliver client requirements. He said, “This is a way of working that provides better value and a faster process; it is faster to planning and provides a better return on investment. Understandably, organisations like medium sized football clubs are very cost conscious. In the main, professional football clubs are not developers and have little experience in development.”
This is innovative and progressive work. Matthew added, “There are a lot of clubs out there who want to update and expand, but the cost is a factor. We know that people are very receptive to the opportunity of doing things better and that is where a service that will deliver a better value and faster product is of interest.
“We recognise that we are at an early adopter stage, breaking new ground in this market, and we are now encouraging feedback and how we can move the phases to push this out to new clients.”
To learn more, contact Matthew Birchall or David Hines.
[ad_2]
Source link