Serbia has started construction on its new National Football Stadium, which is billed to be the world’s first ‘garden football stadium.’
Spanish firm Fenwick Iribarren Architects, which designed three stadiums for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, was commissioned by the Serbian government to design the structure for Serbia’s new National Football Stadium, part of a wider development of a new district around the Sava and Danube rivers on the outskirts of Belgrade.
China State Construction Engineering Corporation, known as CSCEC, has hoisted the first steel structure into place for the long-awaited stadium. CSCEC Steel was responsible for the detailed design, fabrication and installation of the steel structure, which marks the official start of the main steel structure construction.
Blurring the boundary between sport and nature
The circular stadium is set to feature a unique garden design, with three levels of landscaped gardens encircling the stadium, created by four suspended rings connected by cables. “Steel has high strength, toughness and excellent tensile performance, which perfectly supports the project’s world-first ‘three-dimensional garden’ design,” explained a spokesperson for CSCEC Steel.
“To cover the three building floors (L3, L5, L7) of the stadium vertically with trees and shrubs, the project has installed planting floors on the exterior side of the facade and pedestrian walkways on the interior side. This multi-level vertical greenery not only adds to the building’s weight, but also requires the structure to have extremely high load-bearing capacity and resistance to wind and earthquakes. With its outstanding mechanical properties, the steel structure provides reliable support for the staggered multi-level vegetation, successfully achieving a deep integration of professional tournament functions and multi-level ecological gardens.”
As the structure is designed to be flexible, this made installation particularly challenging. “The team chose to pre-assemble the steel columns on the ground and then hoist them as a whole,” says the CSCEC Steel spokesperson. “Once in place, a circle of wind-lashing ropes were used to secure them, ensuring structural safety during construction, while also allowing precise adjustments during installation.”
To save costs and shorten the schedule, a support-free cable construction method was used for the roof. “Detailed construction simulations and an advanced integrated hoisting system were employed to ensure smooth installation of the steel structure on the flexible cables,” reveals the spokesperson.
To manage the risk of such large-scale complicated construction, the project team built a 1:10 scale model to ‘rehearse’ the entire construction process in advance. This helped predict potential risks in procedures, like cable-net lifting and ring beam closure, ensuring that the final construction plan was reliable.
“The rooftop compression ring beams and upper ring beams in the project, which require extremely high precision and total about 719.4 metres in length, were all prefabricated off-site in the factory,” says the spokesperson. “The team came up with an innovative approach using a ‘solid loop pre-assembly process’ and ‘high-precision 3D laser-scanning technology.’ This ‘Made in China’ method, which moves on-site errors to a controlled factory environment, not only ensures millimetre-level processing accuracy (with a total deviation of less than 3mm) but also greatly improves the efficiency and quality of the on-site assembly.”
The stadium’s accessible hanging gardens are designed to unite the stadium with nature and this sustainable, environmentally-friendly focus has been applied to every aspect of the design. London-based built environment consultants and engineers Hilson Moran has been brought in to optimise the project’s sustainability. It states that these planting areas will create a natural ‘green filter’ that will improve air quality within the stadium, increase oxygen levels and provide a reflective ‘biophilic’ acoustic barrier.
Energy efficiency is integral to the design
The stadium is also set to be highly energy-efficient and intelligent in its operation, leading to low operational energy and running costs. It will have a particularly innovative heating and cooling system. ‘District cooling’ technology, using four-pipe chillers, will create a large-scale, highly efficient network of hot and cold water supplies that will cover all of the stadium’s heating and cooling needs. This system enables residual heat, created in the cooling process, to be used to generate hot water for the heating circuit.
Once complete, Serbia’s National Football Stadium will hold 52,000 spectators, meeting the requirements for hosting national team matches and major international UEFA/FIFA events. It will have a total floor area of approximately 76,000 square metres and about 12,600 tons of steel will have been used in its design.
Construction is scheduled for completion at the end of 2026.