BBPV Compass Stadium's Expanded Aluminum Mesh

Even though Houston, Texas, is notorious for its lack of zoning, the city does have a general plan and development regulations that guide growth. East Downtown (EaDo)—a triangular area bound by U.S. Route 59 on the west, Interstate 45 on the south, and railroad tracks on the east—has its own redevelopment plan, of which the BBPV Compass Stadium is a major component. The 22,000-seat stadium was built in 2012 to serve Major League Soccer's (MLS) Houston Dynamo. The design by Populous taps into EaDo's industrial roots through a tessellated exterior wrapped in extruded aluminum mesh from Amico.

In addition to expressing the area's industrial character, the mesh façade allows air movement (the anodized APEX01 mesh used has an open area just shy of 50%) and glows at night, in concert with the translucent orange panels that sit below and sometimes behind the mesh. The triangular steel frames are sizable but flat (three points makes a plane), meaning that the 4x9-foot (1.2x2.75-meter) sheets run vertically on aluminum purlins. This orientation parallels the translucent orange panels, gives an upward thrust to the panels, and echoes the Houston skyline to the west.

Extruded mesh is created by slitting and stretching rolled sheets of aluminum, yielding coverage of four times the raw material—therefore the 4x9-foot sheets covering the stadium were initially 1x2-1/4-feet (0.3x0.7-meters). Combined with the fact the sheets gain strength through the 3-dimensional stretching (note the raised profiles below), the mesh is efficient and much less wasteful than perforated sheets, whose holes become waste.

Amico has supplied mesh for an increasing number of architecturally notable buildings in recent years, such as the New Museum in New York City, designed by SANAA, and Haworth Tompkins's Young Vic Theatre in London. In those applications the mesh fronts solid walls, but BBPV Compass Stadium exploits the potential of the material's porosity and transparency, giving the Houston Dynamo a distinctive home in the process.