The Al Menaa Sports Complex's roof was the first design for which we used a Grasshopper model for structural analysis.
Lead Contact
Steven
Hofmeister
Managing Principal & Structural Engineering Practice Co-Leader
Kansas City
+1.816.412.1836
/
Project Details
Project Partners
HOK
Owner
Iraq Ministry of Youth and Sports
Location
Basrah, Iraq
Completion Date
Ongoing
Area
29,200 m²
Seating Capacity
30,000
Using Advanced Modeling to Honor a Nation’s Past
Designed to honor the nautical history of Basrah, the Al Menaa Sports Complex features the main soccer stadium, two training fields, support buildings and a parking area. The Complex is owned by the Iraq Ministry of Youth and Sport and will help support its mission of promoting Iraqi sport accomplishments throughout the region.
We are providing structural design services to HOK for the 30,000-seat stadium.
Highlights
- The canopy structure consists of a 29,600-square-meter PTFE tensile membrane cable roof system comprising 48 steel masts equally spaced around the perimeter of the seating bowl structure.
- The 48 tri-chord serpentine-shaped steel pipe trusses span from each mast, sweeping horizontally to express movement, to the inner tension ring and then cantilever up to 10.5 meters, forming the forward span.
- Orchestration of such a large, complex and elegant tensile-membrane roof structure required the use of Rhino software with Grasshopper, a parametric plug-in.
- Our parametric model enabled the exploration of key design issues and allowed solutions to be analyzed while accounting for consequent effects to the entire structure.