National Stadium

Designed and planned by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer and constructed within three years in a heroic tour de force, Brasília is the only new 20th-century city to be declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. As a built manifesto of a car-centered, functionally separated city, it is with its monumental and sculptural public buildings one of the icons of modernism.

In this context and with preparations for the football World Cup in 2014 in mind, gmp is working with Castro Mello Arquitetos of Sao Paulo and schlaich bergermann & partner of Stuttgart on the design of Brasília’s new National Stadium.

The existing Mané Garrincha Stadium was completed in 1974 to a design by Ícaro Castro Mello. His son Eduardo Castro Mello is now providing the building with a new lower tier and completing the existing upper tier fragment. Gmp architects and schlaich bergermann & partner are developing the surrounding esplanade with its characteristic “forest of supports” and double-layer suspended roof.

A critical factor in evolving the design was a thorough study of Brasília’s architectural and urban-planning environment and scale.

The aim of the design is to provide a solution appropriate to its importance in terms of architectural history, with clear references to the traditions of the site, while at the same time coming up with a distinctive, contemporary configuration.

As the largest and most public building in the city, lying directly on the central axis of the basic urban-planning figure of Brasília, the composition was developed as a monumental structure that fits appropriately and coherently into the urban-planning context.

This involves surrounding the bowl of the stadium with a circular esplanade containing all access elements, with the roof resting on the “forest of supports”. This clear and simple gesture is reinforced by the strongly minimalist, almost archetypal design of the individual structural members. The key material is concrete, wholly in keeping with Brasília’s architectural culture.

Architecture
Design: Volkwin Marg and Hubert Nienhoff with Knut Göppert, 2008
Project Management: Martin Glass
Project Management, Brazil: Robert Hormes
Director of gmp do Brazil: Ralf Amann
Team members (alphabetical): Ante Bagaric, Holger Betz, Rebecca Bornhauser, Carsten Borucki, Lena Brögger, Martina Maurer-Brusius, Kacarzyna Ciruk, Laura Cruz Lima da Silva, Stefanie Eichelmann, Ruth Gould, Florian Illenberger, Jochen Köhn, Martin Krebes, Helge Lezius, Tobias Mäscher, Adel Motamedi, Burkhard Pick, Jutta Rentsch Serpa, Lucia Martinez Rodriguez, Maryna Samolyuk, Florian Schwarthoff, Sara Taberner Bonastre

In cooperation with
schlaich bergermann and partners, Stuttgart; Castro Mello arquitetos, São Paulo

Engineers
Structural design of roof and esplanade: schlaich bergermann and partners – Knut Göppert with Knut Stockhusen and Miriam Sayeg
Team members (alphabetical) Andreas Bader, Tiago Carvalho, Arnaud Deillon, Uli Dillmann, Stefan Dziewas, Hansmartin Fritz, Alberto Goosen, Hartmut Grauer, Jochen Gugeler, Andreas Hahn, Achim Holl, Hubert Kunz, Christoph Paech, Jana Pavlovic, Bernd Ruhnke, Tilman Schober, Klaus Straub, Cornelia Striegan, Peter Szerzo, Hiroki Tamai, Augusto Tiezzi, Feridun Tomalak, Chih-Bin Tseng, Gerhard Weinrebe, Rüdiger Weitzmann, Andrzej Winkler, Markus Wöhrbach, Kai Zweigart
Structural design of stadium bowl: Etalp, São Paulo
Services engineering – roof (concept and scheme design): b.i.g. Bechtold Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH; mha, São Paulo
Light concept (concept and scheme design): Conceptlicht, Taunreut; Peter Gaspar, São Paulo; mha, São Paulo,

Seats
approx. 72,800

Construction period
2010 -2013