Location: Århus, Jylland, Danmark
Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects
The competition to build the new Aarhus Football Stadium in Denmark was won by the team composed of Zaha Hadid Architects, architecture and engineering firm Sweco, and landscape architects Tredje Natur. The design concept for the “Arena of the Forest,” as it is known, is inspired by the upward rhythm of the up to 47-meter-tall trees that surround it. The new stadium is envisioned as an extension of the forest, continuing the verticality of the forest in the public colonnades and timber ribs of the stadium’s façade. These vertical movements extend from the forest through the landscaped plaza and the colonnaded concourses of the stadium.
The roof of the new stadium is intended to provide the greatest weather protection and increase comfort in the internal concourses as well as the adjacent external plazas, defining a sheltered 360-degree public circulation route that is independent of the events inside the stadium and creating warm new public spaces for a variety of civic, recreational, and cultural uses by the local community and visitors to the park. The huge horizontal volume of the stadium is divided into a human scale along with an elaborate hierarchy of timber ribs in the façade and roof, giving the crowd gathered in the nearby public plazas a sense of arrival.
