WINTER 2016
With an estimated 3.5 billion fans
worldwide, football is the most
popular sport in the world; and
FIFA World Cup tournaments,
held once every four years, are
Olympic Games-level events. For
host countries, the creation of
new venues and the ancillary facilities and infrastructure needed
to support them are billion-dollar
projects, nearly a decade in the
making. These projects present
the opportunity for architects,
structural engineers and
landscape architects to bring
their “A-game” to — quite literally
— a world-wide audience.
Polis Group Ltd of Christchurch
has won the job of designing the
Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, about
an hour north of Doha. Al Bayt
Stadium will serve as one of eight
venues for the FIFA World Cup
2022. The project design encompasses landscape, architecture,
lighting, irrigation and engineering on a scale and challenge
unknown in New Zealand.
Polis is a long-standing collaboration between Chris Glasson
Landscape Architects and Thom
Craig Architect Ltd. Glasson says
the Al Bayt design is inspired by
an abstraction of the Arabian
Desert. The stadium is situated on
a high plateau, eight metres above
25
the surrounding parkland. “The
stadium is like the tent,” Glasson
explains. “It’s the centrepiece and
it offers shelter.”
Wadis or water channels run off
the plateau and meander through
the parkland to form waterfalls
and visual and structural oases,
which will support plant life and
act as nodes for visitor activity.
Paths through the landscape
will read as dry wadis, and will
follow a similarly meandering
journey through the folds of the
landscape, which represent the
dunes of the sandy desert.
An area of more than than two
million square metres around the