Cagliari Calcio Stadium (Sports)
Cagliari, Sardinia, Italia
Design Firm | Manica Architecture
VIEW MANICA SPOTLIGHT
(Aerial Render - Sea-front Elevation, Hotel, & Courtyards - Render by Other)
My time at Manica Architecture was spent assisting the Schematic Design (Progetto Definitivo in Italy) of an undisclosed Soccer Stadium in Italy. A majority of this time went towards the outfitting and design of spaces on the Event and Main Concourse levels. In addition, I assisted the design of a Field Level Club, Private Suites and Lounges, and the Press Level areas. Some time was spent on building Sections, Sightline Sections, and seat counts.
(All of the following renders were created by another project teammate.) They have been included for informational and contextual purposes.
My contributions to this project were primarily—but not limited to—as follows:
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C-Value and Seating Bowl Sections | Calculated the clearance from a viewer’s eye level to the head of a fan in the adjacent row, ensuring the Field of Play was visible from each seat.
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SEATING COUNT PLANS | Ensured calculations for seating capacity were correct.
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QUANTITY SURVEY NUMBERS | Added for all Walls, Floors, Doors, Ceilings, and Fixtures.
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FULL & QUADRANT STADIUM PLANS | Managed all labels in English and Italian languages.
(Render Vignettes - Urban Context, Major Building Elevations, & Interior Views - Renders created by project teammate)
The existing venue of the Cagliari Calcio football club—ex Stadio Sant'Elia—was abandoned midway through the team's 2011-2012 season in Italy's top flight of competition, the Serie A. This was due to safety concerns over the venue's structural integrity and inability to meet base requirements established by the Serie A.
In 2017, construction was begun on a low-capacity, provisional stadium located to the immediate west of the Sant'Elia, where the team returned to until the completion of its replacement. In 2020, the new venue—Unipol Domus—was completed and the Sant'Elia closed its doors for the last time.
In 2021, Manica Architecture was selected as the design-only Architectural team that would theorize the permanent, higher capacity replacement to the Unipol Domus, known as the Nuovo Stadio Sant'Elia. The Unipol Domus will remain the club's home venue until the new venue's completion.
The new stadium sits at a crux between the scenic Mediterranean coastline, a district packed full of concert and top-flight athletics venues, and numerous residential developments. Thus, it must pay respect to and offer seamless transitions to each.
To the north, pedestrian bridges cross a major roadway and canal to connect with the neighboring athletics venues and piazzas. To the venue's east, the current Unipol Domus will eventually be demolished in favor of a vegetated carpark and commercial district. To the south and west, a natural buffer exists in the form of a 6-lane highway—the Viale Salvatore Ferrara—and the preceding areas will be infilled with additional landscaped carparks. Additional parking lots, beachfront walkways and piazzas, and apartment complexes lie on the opposite side of the highway. Verdant and watery thresholds help isolate the noisy and active site from it's more private surroundings.
FLOOR PLANS
Overall Plan - Event Level
EVENT LEVEL
The ground level of this facility is at grade level to the Plan south and subterranean at the Plan north. Standard attendees enter from the North, East and West while the VIP spectators enter from the south. Those with pitch-level suites proceed through the reception atrium and directly towards the private suites along the south-end of the playing field. Those with seats at the Upper Level clubs proceed through elevators and stairs to their destination. A museum dedicated to Club History is located on the reception area's right flank, while a conference rooms for post-match interviews occupies the left flank. The Home and Away locker rooms are situated between the private suites and the museum/conference areas.
A vehicular entrance is tucked behind the hotel area and this allows for team buses to discreetly enter the stadium and wait beyond a secured barrier during match days. It delivers the players and personnel directly to their Locker Room suites.
At the four corners of the field—shown in light brown—are warehouses for storing and growing the panelized-sections of natural-grass playing surfaces under UV lighting. Prior to match day, the sections are moved through specialized vomitories and assembled to create the soccer field. Additional storage spaces surround the event area and allow for barriers, soccer goals, video-boards, and more equipment to be secured in a moment's notice.
A concourse circumscribes three of the four quadrants—to the North, East, and West—and provides a litany of concessions booths, team merchandise stores, restrooms, and vertical egress cores for the spectators. Areas shown in white are Locale di Terzi—translated to third-party spaces in English—which are unfinished core and shells that are intended for tenant build-outs during construction or later.
MAIN CONCOURSE LEVEL
The main concourse level is dedicated to providing access to and services for the majority of seats within the stadium. Fans circulate around the various concessions and restroom spaces, into vomitories, and enter the seating bowl. They have the choice of continuing down into the lower bowl or ascending stairs towards the upper seating bowl.
Since hooliganism and violence are commonplace around Italian Soccer, Visiting fans are provided their own section of the stadium, where they have access to a separate entry, concourse, concession and restroom area, and corner of the seating bowl. This is located at the top right corner of the plan below. Glass barriers separate this section from all of the home fans.
To the plan south, you will see the VIP Club section shown in red. This contains several upscale bars and cocktail lounges, multiple suites divided by operable partitions, and a terrace with direct views to the field.
Overall Plan - Main Concourse Level
SEATING PLANS
Overall Plan - Seating Counts by Section
SEATING PLAN
The seating plans are a valuable resource that allows the design team to easily calculate the total amount of seats within the entire stadium, a seating section as a whole, and individual rows. In addition, it is utilized for tallying up handicap- and companion-seating as required by code.
Additionally, it provides the location of berths dedicated for broadcast cameras, which are distributed relatively equally around the circumference of the stadium.
The base configuration of the stadium allows for 25,000 fixed seats and several areas for standing-only ticketholders. This creates a sizable gap between the exterior walls and the backside of the Upper seating bowl. At the expanded 30,000 seat configuration, this gap is completely infilled with 7 additional rows of seats. A notch is removed behind each of the video-boards to ensure every single seat has unobstructed views of the field. This expanded capacity gives the venue the ability to host higher level matches, such as Champions League and World Cup events.
SECTIONS
SIGHLINE SECTIONS
Sightline sections are drawn to prove that the rake-angles of the concrete seating bowl allow for each seated fans to spectate the match without any visual obstructions, such as the those seated in front of them.
These obstructions include, but aren't limited to, the following:
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Fans seated in lower rows
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Broadcast and camera equipment
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The tops of Vomitories or other accessways
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Video-boards and cantilevered roof structures
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Advertisement video-boards at the Event level
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Guardrails at all passageways and bottom of seating bowls
Transverse Section - Cut along the Short-Axis of Playing Field
OVERALL SECTIONS
Building sections help reveal the volumetric complexities of the stadium, where 6 occupied floors and several user-groups are nestled between a sloping and retreating concrete seating bowl.
One thing that becomes quite evident in these sections is that vertical egress cores--stairs and elevators--are pushed towards the exterior perimeter of the building so that they won't conflict with the sloped seating bowl.
Many of the ground level spaces are double-high areas. This creates large, welcoming, and lively volumes for fans immediately upon entering. Many of the floors above feature single-high spaces only as vertical space comes at a premium.
The cantilevered roof structure tapers--from its thinnest at the bearing points on the exterior--to a deep truss that follows the path of the oculus. These trusses angle down in order to direct sightlines and sounds directly towards the soccer pitch instead of out and past the roof oculus.
This roof oculus allows for passive ventilation of the venue as well as an area to permit sun onto the natural grass playing surface.