Arup Associates’ design for 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar Showcase is the world’s most sustainable stadium, a radical piece of environmental architecture that was a major driver in Qatar’s sustainability plan and World Cup bid.

The 500-seat zero-carbon exemplar stadium is a football stadium like no other. It is a proof-of-concept for innovative cooling and climate control technologies and a development platform to refine these technologies for application across Qatar and potentially across all arid regions.

The original brief from the Qatar 2022 client team was for a simple pavilion that demonstrated some cooling performance technologies, however after working with the client in workshops Arup Associates developed with them the idea of a radical environmental approach and the idea of zero carbon technologies being a differentiator for their Qatar cup bid. A key part of the eventual Qatar bid brought to reality the themes of a responsible world cup in a very hot climate and the issues of being able to dissemble it and ship the technologies to other cultures.

Working to an absolute deadline of the FIFA officials visit to hae a completed stadium, fully operational, the showcase was designed in just 8 weeks, and had a construction timeline of four and a half months after the contractor had been selected.

The stadium has been designed as a hybrid of fast and lightweight construction technologies with local, vernacular means of construction. The compelling rhythmic geometry of the canopy roof plays an important part in the sustainability strategy of the stadium. The canopy roof rotates, to provide shade within the building and insulate against the sun. It is the first roof of its type and is already considered a pioneering move towards a more environmentally responsible approach to stadia architecture.

The Qatar 2022 Showcase offers the most sophisticated techniques for capturing and storing the power of the sun. And, as all the energy for the showcase is generated from the sun, over the year, the building has no carbon emissions. During the FIFA visit, with an outside temperature having reached 44 degrees only two hours earlier, the temperature on the pitch was recorded as 23 degrees.

Source: http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=20187