Burj Hammoud Stadium

2me Classe - Phase i - design research

Personal Project

Faculty:

Joseph el Hourany

Situated in the dense Burj Hammoud, the football field of this area is to be expanded to host more spectators. Bourj Hammoud is a mixed residential, industrial and commercial area and is one of the most densely populated districts in the Middle East.

This project's brief asks for expanding the stadium, i.e. with keeping the green field in place, by designing a retractable roof football stadium for Burj Hammoud. The retractable roof structure was inspired by a memory alloy, and hence a frame was created which was thought of in different 3d rotations, torsions and twisting to change it's footprint.

From the retractable mechanism, the larger part of the roof over the spectators is a continuation of the retractable part in relaxed state, it is an ellipse twisted on its diagonal giving a hyperbolic paraboloidal surface. Trusses then hold this roof over a concrete shell following the same form, but given form deformation on the side to become accessible by pedestrians.

Trusses

The structural mechanism of this retractable roof structure inspires the form of the whole project. The experimental model is made using a metal memory alloy and stretch fabric, as the frame is twisted - by getting two points on the frame towards each other- the object will have a smaller and smaller footprint until it gets to a footprint as minimal as the thickness of the frame. This method of minimizing the footprint was thought instead of moving out a structure to create an opening, and thus this surface, includes motors that work internally in a varying rate to get points on the frame closer or further and hence controlling the degree of twist.

Trusses

The Trusses inspired by the natural cantilevered structure, the wings of the dragonfly look at different sections according to an analysis done according to force bearing and different section contours. The sections first classified as sections A, B and C were then merged as AB, BC, AC, ABC, etc to be distributed on the bottom surface of the twisted roof according to a structural analysis.