Braga Municipal Stadium

General Info

Area: 28.000m2
Client: Câmara Municipal de Braga
Architecture: Souto Moura Arquitectos, SA

Details

The new Braga Municipal Stadium, designed by Souto de Moura, was built for the European Football Championship - Euro 2004 has a capacity for 30,154 covered seats. The final form of the stadium includes two benches, one on each side of the field, with a suspended (by cables) coverage, which will win a 200m span. 

The roof cables have a single curvature relying on the self-weight of the reinforced concrete elements to resist the effects of wind loads. The behaviour of the coverage was verified on wind tunnel tests on both rigid and aero elastic models.

The coverage was carried out with prefabricated elements, which were placed in the respective position by sliding each one of the elements along the cables. After positioning all the elements in the appropriate places, a layer of concrete "in situ" was placed. To drain the large area of the coverage it was defined that the cables outline would present a variation from the central arrow just to one side, thus ensuring a constant from the inferior side of the two coverage slabs. 

This allowed the rain water to drain at the edge of each coverage, cascading down to two separated collecting water basins - with proper architectural features - which have horizontal stainless steel "channels", bearing a 25m cantilever and supported by concrete columns with 16.5m and 3.2m height. This water is drained by the interior of the column to the local drainage system.

Many of the service layouts are located inside the concrete vertical support walls. Both sides of these walls are visible in the completed project, so the accurate coordination between services and structures was essential.

This work was awarded with the Secil Prize for Architecture in 2004 and the Secil Prize for Engineering in 2005.

Authors of images: Christian Richter / afaconsult