The App
The purpose of the app is to help Step 0 of designing a stadium. This is a complex subject, in fact FIFA has a 1300 page handbook capturing the explicit requirements for every aspects of the design, down to the finest details, which is driven by benchmarked operational needs. The scope of the app focuses on the main parameters that define the geometry of the seating bowl. The target users would be sports architects, and the app would facilitate the conceptualization and visualization of stadium bowl design options in the process of establishing the Basis of Design for the stadium.
Stadium Seating Bowl Design Parameters
When it comes to stadium design the #1 design generator is the seating bowl, every other aspect of the design is aligned to this. The main KPIs, however are the spectator capacity and the quality of the view. These aspects are driven by the geometry of the seating bowl – on a very high level – by how close the spectators are to the pitch, the amount of leg space and the parameter called C-value.
The field of play is a standard 105x68m plus a 5m grassed area bound by the advertising boards. Then the technical zone or pitch area, which is minimum 3.5m from the ad boards to the bleachers.
The depth of each row, and the size of the seats and the distance between them have minimum set values.
Every spectator has to have unobstructed view on the entire field of play, if any object interferes with it, then it is considered as a seat kill, hence it cannot be considered in the net seating capacity (the ticket for that seat cannot be sold at full price). The C-value basically represents the view range on the entire pitch limited by the spectator in front of us, and it is calculated by a fairly complicated formula. The eye positions are generalized, assuming that each spectator has the same sitting height and sitting in the same way: the elevation of the eye position is 1.20 cm from the bleacher floor and 15cm horizontally from the face of the bleacher behind.
Also, there is a maximum viewing distance (190m) criterion that frames the negotiation of design.
The design of the arena is really the negotiation of comfort and capacity: if we increase the row depth, there will be more leg space, but the viewing distance increases for each spectator, hence the maximum capacity decreases. Same goes if we increase the C-value or we add an athletic track.
App Functionality
User inputs, app outputs and metadata
The end user will be able to manipulate the values of the following parameters:
- Technical Area size (distance between the adboards and the bleachers)
- C-value
- Number of seating rows and its dimensions
- Bleacher dimensions
- Seating dimensions (seats, seating blocks, gangways)
The app allows you to set a combination of these parameters that influence the seating bowl geometry and computing them to generate the seating bowl. Along with the arena geometry the app calculates and displays the gross spectator capacity as well.
Currently the app is limited to a single, lower tier bleacher with a maximum of 30 rows, hence the maximum viewing distance is not interrogated – it is difficult to surpass the 190m limit with these constraints. The next step however, would be to incorporate upper tier design generation as well, in this case maximum viewing distance capping would be included. Adding the functionality to set different viewing parameters for different constituent groups, designing camera positions and generating seat kill checks and C-value heatmaps the application would cover all the bottlenecks in football stadia concept design providing solutions to investigate all of them in a single web tool.
