Knock on wood

​Forest Green Rovers Eco Stadium

Zaha Hadid Architects

Situation

The Forest Green Rovers Eco Stadium is to become more than just a stadium. Users Forest Green Rovers are the ” greenest football club in the world “, their president is Dale Vince, the founder of Ecotricity. The stadium will be the centrepiece of the £100 million, 40-hectare sports and green technology park development funded by Ecotricity.

The Green Rovers Eco Stadium was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, and their interest in exploring new forms, materials and technologies is – proven.

However, at the moment there is not much that indicates that this ambitious project will become reality.

Vision

Forest Green Rovers have established a holistic vision for the site to retain its pastoral qualities whilst adding new facilities for the town.

While the stadium will be the centrepiece, the project creates a new public realm with both recreational and occupational uses, enabling the entire site to contribute to the town – not only on match days, but every day of the year.

Design

The design retains and enhances the existing meadow landscape of the site whilst adding the stadium and other functions for the town. Embodying low carbon construction methods and operational processes, it will be the first all timber football stadium with almost every element made of sustainably sourced timber including its structure, roof cantilevers and louvered cladding.

As a building material, timber is highly durable, recyclable and beautiful. The proximity of the stadium’s structural elements to each other has also been determined to enable the seating terraces and floor slab to be made from timber. In most other stadiums, these elements are concrete or steel.

The stadium’s roof is covered with a transparent membrane, which contributes to turf growth, minimizes stark shadows for players and fans and reduces the volumetric impact of the stadium from distant views in the surrounding landscape.

Atmosphere

With the team’s community and supporters at its core, fans will be as close as five meters from the pitch and the position of every seat has been calculated to provide excellent, unrestricted views of the entire field of play. The stadium’s continuous spectator bowl surrounding the pitch will maximise matchday atmosphere.

The stadium’s design incorporates the club’s future growth. Initially for 5,000 spectators, increasing to 10,000 with the club’s success, expansion from phase 1 to phase 2 can be achieved without the costs of major construction works.

Carbon

Forest Green Rovers’ new stadium and Eco Park aims to be carbon neutral or carbon negative, including measures such as the provision of on-site renewable energy generation.

Dale Vince, Ecotricity founder and Forest Green Rovers chairman, said: “The really standout thing about this stadium is that it’s going to be almost entirely made of wood – the first time that will have been done anywhere in the world.

“The importance of wood is not only that it’s naturally occurring, it has very low embodied carbon – about as low as it gets for a building material.

“And when you bear in mind that around three quarters of the lifetime carbon impact of any stadium comes from its building materials, you can see why that’s so important – and it’s why our new stadium will have the lowest embodied carbon of any stadium in the world.

Eco Park

Half of Eco Park will consist of state-of-the-art sporting facilities, including the new stadium, grass and all-weather training pitches, publicly accessible multi-disciplinary facilities, and a sports science hub.

The other half will comprise a green technology business park with sustainably built commercial offices and light industrial units, giving Eco Park the potential to create up to 4,000 jobs, including room for the continued expansion of green energy company Ecotricity, who have submitted the overall proposal and who are already the biggest employer in Stroud with 700 people located across four sites.

The proposal will also see the development of a nature reserve on the site, a potential public transport hub, including a Stroud Park and Ride, as well as help with the restoration of the Stroudwater canal.

Local parish councils initially endorsed the entire project, but rejected it in the summer of 2019.

Whether and how things will continue is currently completely uncertain. A shame.

We did this.

Project data and companies involved

Architect

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA)

Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Jim Heverin, Sara Klomps, Karthikeyan, Arunachalam, Sara Akbari, Muriel Boselli, Avery Chen, Saman Dadgostar, Cynthia Du, Paulo Flores, Fabian Hecker, Jakub Klaska, Vincent Konaté, Igor Pantic, Edgar Payan, Sven Torres, Theodor Wender, Richard Wasenegger

Address

Forest Green Rovers Football Club
The New Lawn Stadium Another Way
Nailsworth GL6 0FG
Vereinigtes Königreich

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