Podcast. A better view of stadium design, produced by Engineering Matters

A Better View of Stadium Design

When you are designing a stadium for the World Cup, or any major sport, it’s vital to have a fan’s-eye view. For more than a century, the architects tasked with designing stadiums have used the C-value, developed by Victorian theatre designer John Russel. But this value just measures the view in one direction, towards the stage. Sporting events are viewed in the round, with fans all around the stadium bowl.

In this episode, we hear from Mark Fenwick, whose practice has designed stadiums for the Qatar World Cup, and for leading European football teams. He explains how Fenwick Iribarren has built on the Victorian concept of C-values and sightlines in theatre design, with the FI-Factor, a new system for mapping the spectators’ view from each seat in a stadium.

Mark describes the sub-factors considered, explains how this was first used during bidding for a new world cup stadium at Education City in Qatar, its subsequent use in Valencia, and its scope for use on other stadiums.

Transcription

MF : Mark Fenwick | Fenwick Iribarren Architects

You know the ball’s in the back of the net.

But were you able to follow every moment of the play that got it there?

That’s the experience Mark Fenwick partner at Fenwick Iribarren Architects is aiming to deliver for every fan, at some of the world’s largest stadiums.

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.

MF : Theater design was very much focused in one direction to the stage.

MF : In stadium design, we're looking at 360 degrees all around the pitch itself.

MF : We wanted to somehow evaluate how that could be put into a numerical value

Mark and his colleagues developed the Fi-Factor to establish this numerical value, as they competed with other architects to build a new world cup stadium at Education City in Qatar.

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 : We decided to take on board five different bowl quality parameters

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.

To get a better understanding of how the Fi-Factor could be used, Fenwick’s practice ran the numbers on some comparable stadiums, including one of the world’s oldest and most well known.

MF : We actually looked at the Colosseum in Rome which we thought it'd be quite interesting to see how the designers 2,000 years ago had actually taken the challenge of designing a good bowl. The Colosseum was 371 which is actually not bad not bad and it's 2000 years ago

MF : And we compared the Real Madrid Stadium which is actually less than that, 355, and the Barcelona Stadium, which is about 385. So Colosseum is actually slightly better than the Real Madrid Stadium Bowl and just slightly worse than the Barcelona Stadium

In 2024, FIA joined 10N, Egis Group's new collective of architecture practices.

MF : We are actually working with the Egis engineers and the Egis sports department at the moment in different projects that we're looking at, not only in stadiums but we're also—because Egis has also been involved in Olympics, they were in the Paris Olympics also—we are now looking at different projects with Egis where the Fi Factor will be included into the analysis.

MF : Hopefully this is something that we can now take to much wider markets because with Egis now we are working to much bigger markets. We're looking at the United States, we're looking into China and so this knowledge that we have and the knowledge sharing that we have also with Aegis is actually working amazingly well.

They are examining how to take the Fi-Factor to new venue types.

MF : We are now applying it to rugby, we can apply it to concerts.

MF : But concerts is slightly different actually because concerts becomes more like a theatre because in a football stadium where the spectacle or the experience is in the centre of the pitch, in concerts they take them to the end of the pitch, they tend to be at the end of the stadium, at one end, and it becomes more like a theatre configuration.

And the Fi-Factor can also be used to add value to existing stadiums.

MF :We're looking at a couple of stadiums at the moment where what we can do is—if you have an existing stadium, not in all the stadium, but in areas of the stadium—where you want to slightly make a better, you know, experience you can build on top of the existing...

MF : ...bowl structure, you can build on top of that and slightly modify bowl shape, to be much much better.

MF : We are looking at sort of like micro surgery on some existing stadiums to refurbish and make a much much better spectacular experience.

Podcast. A better view of stadium design, produced by Engineering Matters

A Better View of Stadium Design

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Transcription

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