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Za Breg Stadium Zagreb Building

Sports Development in Croatia: Arena Building design by njiric+ arhitekti d.o.o.

19 Jan 2010

Za Breg Stadium Building

ZA (BREG) 2012

Design: njiric+ arhitekti d.o.o.

Bigness. The size of the stadium goes beyond the human experience of public spaces. It’s overwhelming quality comes from the simple fact of an exceptional proportion and as an extreme accumulation of built form. The stadium as The Presence, an object which is “just there”. The new landmark for the city.

Za Breg Stadium Zagreb

Stadium is not a house – stadium is a topography. This principal point of departure is maintained in different aspects of the project. Similar to the greek amphitheatre, it harnesses the natural undulation of the landscape – the new civic arena is housed within the artificial hillock.

It fits well with the recognition of three sport hills as a potential for development in Zagreb – one for the skiing (Medvednica), one for the free time (Jakuševac dump area), and one for football.

The Bilbao effect – a necessity to concentrate such an amount of program in the geometrical city centre gives way for a new icon of the 21st century. Modernist vocabulary is derived from the sources like the cultural centre in Le Havre by Oscar Niemeyer.

Two different elevations – an undulated landscape from the outside, an inferno from the inside. Minimal expression on the outside, the dynamics of roof construction on the inside. The treshold as a line of a drammatic change – the revealing of space from minimal to maximal.

Beside the main event in the arena, the very slope becomes a place for a number of side-events on the outside – from skateboard and free-climb to amphitheatre and projection screen.

A hybrid. The stadium also houses various commercial programs linked to the nearby retail areas, even by a cable-car towards the shopping island.

The zeppelin. For covering the central area of the pitch a zeppelin-like baloon structure is proposed. Phenomenologically, it represents a symbiotic partnership with the mound – like the shark’s own little cleaning-fish, like the US president and the AWACS plane.

The cloud serves as a signal, as a screen that reflects the spectacle into the broader public space. Besides it’s predominant function of covering the playground, the sewn-in photovoltaics generate energy and it also mediates information (current score, minutes to start, commercial ads, etc.)

Ecology. The outer sheath of the hill is made of recycled rubber, pigmented blue and sprayed onto the corrugated aluminium sheets.

Construction of the stadium is innovative (the combination of steel cables, ETFE membranes and polycarbonate domes has never been used in such a way ever before), superlight, and rational. Beside the lightweight steel elements, the stands are conceived as a prefab concrete necessity – no big spans, no heroic gestures. An anti-trendy construction.

After the competition the project was nick-named “The Blue Volcano” in the daily press and internet.

njiric+ arhitekti