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Sports City Stadium

Sports City Stadium, located along the Persian Gulf in the eastern coastal city of Doha, should be the most versatile of the 12 stadiums to be built in Qatar's proposed $57 billion plan. The stadium's primary components are all retractable — its roof, its seats, even its field.

Dan Meis, an architect with the Kansas City architecture firm Populous, led the stadium's design. He explained that he wanted the venue to have a lasting effect. "Often countries will build stadiums for the events, and they have difficulty utilizing the building afterwards," Meis told Wired.com, citing Beijing's 2008 Olympic Bird's Nest as an example.

His vision to incorporate versatility meshed perfectly with a key element of Arabian culture. Much of the structure's architectural inspiration is drawn from a Bedouin tent, traditionally used by the Arab ethnic group. The tents have a simple architectural design which enables them to adapt to their environment. "The notion of these tents that were flexible and could grow, depending on the number of people utilizing them, was really interesting," Meis said.

The partially retractable roof, which will open and close in 15 to 20 minutes, has a design element that sets it apart from others: It will be large enough to hold people within it. Meis saw an opening within the depth of the trusses that support the roof where people could walk around and look down onto the field. "That's something I played around with in other stadiums but had never built," Meis said.

It will add to the 47,560-seat occupancy of the stadium, which can be adjusted downward for concerts, exhibitions, and other non-soccer events. Meis said the technology to adjust seating draws on Saitama Stadium in Japan. Large seating blocks move on trucks, similar to train tracks. They can slide back and be moved elsewhere to open up space. In that regard, they're similar to the retractable field, which can be moved to an adjacent site. It's similar to what's used at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, where the field is moved off-site to accommodate other events.

There will also be an in-stadium cooling system to keep players and spectators from overheating in a climate where temperatures surpass 100 degrees. Every venue is expected to take part in a countrywide zero-carbon-emissions plan. An off-site solar farm will transfer energy to a city grid. Solar collectors will use the sun's power to heat up water, which will then be transported to an on-site water storage tank, which will keep the water's high temperature.

When the venue needs to use its cooling system, the hot water will run through an absorption chiller that will chill the water and send it into another tank which will pump 64-degree air at the ankle and neck level in each row of seats. The air will be distributed throughout the stadium and ultimately produce an 80-degree temperature near the soccer pitch.

That cooling system will combine with the stadium's retractable roof, whose reach will extend beyond the pitch to plazas outside the venue to create an oasis-like feel in the desert. And in that way, Qatar plans to mesmerize the world in 12 years by showing how the world's most popular sport can be played in one of the globe's hottest climates.

Read on for more descriptions and photos from Qatar's successful World Cup bid.

Image courtesy Qatar 2022.

Authors: Kyle Stack

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