Zaha Hadid Architects has been commissioned to design a 5,000-seat stadium built entirely from wood, for the British football club Forest Green Rovers.
“Zaha Hadid are a globally renowned company with a fantastic and unique style. They have built some fantastic sport stadia around the world, including one at the Olympic Park in London.
The London-based firm set up by the late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid won an international competition to design the stadium for the National League team, seeing off competition from over 50 other entrants from Europe and America.
The plans started with the announcement of the new stadium which is to be the world’s first timber football stadium, and now they have revealed their plans for a series of glass hubs, some of which are enveloped in timber stripes. These same timber stripes constitute the humpback bridge. “The Green Technology Hub proposals apply the latest sustainable design technologies with ecologically sound materials and construction methods to create an integrated community for world-leading research and development,” said Zaha Hadid Architects. “The bridge design creates one single, fluid form by fusing together individual timber elements. This important, unifying gesture builds connections for the community, conveying Eco Park as a facility for all.”
Designed to be the world’s greenest football stadium, it will be constructed completely from wood and powered by sustainable energy sources.
“The really standout thing about this stadium is that it’s going to be entirely made of wood – the first time that will have been done anywhere in the world,” said Forest Green Rovers chairman Dale Vince.
“The importance of using wood is not only that it’s a naturally occurring material, it has very low carbon content – about as low as it gets for a building material,” he added.
“Our new stadium will have the lowest carbon content of any stadium in the world. This really will be the greenest football stadium in the world.”
Mr Vince, who has banned meat eating at the current Forest Green Rovers ground and expects his players to follow his vegan lifestyle, said the stadium will be the centre piece of a £100m Eco Park that he wants to develop near Eastington, Glos. It would make Forest Green the “greenest football stadium in the world,” he said. “I think this is going to be special for the club, for the town, for the district and for the whole of county,” he said.
