Prefabrication experiments - 348 - Demountable Football Stadium for the Qatar World Cup

 

Impermanent and short-lived events such as the Olympic Games or universal exhibitions have certainly been the setting for the development of innovative infrastructure or edifices, and they are always the locus of important government spending. Investment and spending to organize these events culminate in the best and the worst that humanity has to offer; for some, games improve international relations, while according to opposing views their infrastructure disrupts territories and neighborhoods for a shortly lived marketing stunt. The objective of providing adequate facilities for the scale of an international competition with the least possible disturbance seems to be difficult to achieve and events often generate white elephants that still require maintenance, are swiftly forgotten, or even abandoned, once the event ends.  The concept of mobile or demountable buildings has been explored from time to time to respond to events’ specific needs and the challenges of impermanence.

 

Already making headlines for many of the wrong reasons: the preparations for Qatar’s world cup coming up in November 2022 have been cited for malpractices including forced labor and inadequate safety and living conditions for workers.

 

Responding to the temporary nature of the World Cup of Football, Fenwick Iribarren Architects have designed a modular and demountable stadium. On a site near Doha's port, the design includes elements inspired by the intermodal shipping presence in the city. The Ras Abu Aboud Stadium Structure is a modern-day colosseum designed as a skeletal megastructure infilled with ready-made boxes. The steel post and beam framework supports steel girders for roofs or platforms to create a type of scaffolding structure laid out in an oval annular shape to circumscribe the football pitch. Recycled shipping containers are carried by this steel scaffold to serve functional needs from seating to food service, concession stands, bathrooms and other amenities. The structure is conceived with spans and dimensions that are generic enough to be disassembled and reassembled in other contexts or even to be built in smaller stadium formats.  The reversible system potentially avoids the waste that comes with building a once in a lifetime transient edifice.

Qatar demountable football stadium