MF : What really is the issue in stadium design is that obviously the pitch is the most important part of the game, because that's where it's played. And the bowl is the area where people are seated around the pitch. They look down to the pitch and they participate in the game themselves. There's an interaction between the bowl and the pitch, which is fundamental.
Welcome to Engineering Matters. I’m Rhian Owen, and I’m Alex Conacher. In this episode, part of a mini-series produced in partnership with Egis, we’ll be getting close to the action of stadium design, and learning how a unique algorithm is helping ensure every fan has the best possible view.
The science behind ensuring a good viewing experience goes back to John Russell, a Victorian theatre designer. Russell developed the C-value, which measured each theatregoer’s ability to see the stage.
Spelled F I, the name is both a pun on the name for Fenwick’s practice, Fenwick Iribarren, and—as Phi is the fifth letter in the Greek alphabet—a reference to the factors considered.
MF : Obviously, the first one is the C value, the quality of how you can see over the head in front of the guy.
MF : The distance of your seat to the opposite corner would be the second one.
MF : The angle of vision with the field, is sort of the angle of where you look at the field, at the angle that you're looking at the pitch.
MF : It's not the same to be right down on the pitch level as to be up higher, where you can get a different vision of the game.
MF : Where your seat is located in the stadium, corners and the centre, and how your seat is orientated to the pitch.
The FI-factor can be represented by a number up to to five hundred, based on weighted values of the five sub-factors. It can also be represented graphically, with the colour of each seat ranging from green, through blue, to red.
MF : We were able to show the bowl that we had designed to the Qatar 2022 client and we were able to see where the red points were, the blue areas and everything. And we were then able to go back to them and say, look, we can touch it up a bit and modify it a bit and we then came up with a bowl which actually has a value of 473 which is actually extremely good.
They didn’t just achieve their goal with the client, they were able to offer a valuable assist as the client considered uses for the stadium.
MF : It's very well known that athletics is not good for football. A football stadium/athletics track takes people further away and we did a FI factor for athletics when we presented the education city stadium and it came out at 295.
MF : They were actually wondering whether to do athletics and football together, this convinced them that it was wrong to do that.
Exhilarated by their World Cup win, the team decided to take the same tactics to Valencia. Here, they were already working on a new stadium.
MF : The bowl was built, all the concrete of the bowl was built, when the projects in Qatar started in 2009. So the bowl in Valencia was built before we had the FI factor and when we did the FI factor on it, it came out at a value of 440.
The lower value of the Valencia stadium isn’t just a result of not having the FI factor ready for the pre-design of the stadium. It’s also a bigger stadium, with space for over 70,000 fans, compared to Education City’s 44,000.
MF : With the FI factor the bigger a stadium gets, the more penalised it gets because a lot of people are further away from the pitch.