Allianz Arena

On 8th February 2002 the decision was taken to build a new Munich soccer stadium. The architects Herzog & de Meuron were awarded the planning order. The stadium will offer rain-protected seats for approximately 67,000 spectators. For this purpose, Europe’s biggest underground car park will be built with approximately 11,000 places to park. The start of construction took place in autumn 2002.

The covering area of the building is split up in the roof consisting of two-layered white and transparent foil cushions as well as the façade with foil cushions whose outside is printed. The printing resp. coating was necessary, because the soccer clubs using the stadium would like to make its façade illuminated by the individual club colours during the soccer matches. This will be achieved by means of spotlights installed at the inner side of the facades.

Covering the stadium with foil cushions guarantee the best possible protection of all spectators from weather impacts such as snow and rain.
Light of as much natural origin as possible is required to ensure the growing of the grass and lighting of the numerous restaurants, offices, kiosks and boxes. Consequently, a transparent building covering made of air-supported, two-layered ETFE-foil cushions was chosen proving a light transmission of 95%.

The covering consists of 2.816 individual rhomboid cushions. Only two of them have the same cutting patterns. The edge lengths range between approximately 4 m and 8 m. The maximum span is from 2 m to approximately 4.25 m. The longest diagonal lengths are about 16 m. Each cushion is connected to a permanent air supply and can resist a snow height of approximately 1.6 m. Due to the existing sealing joints the façade cushions have to take changes of length of up to +/- 13 mm. Therefore, covertex developed a worldwide unique fixation system ensuring the permanent sealing of these sealing joints considering at the same time the complicated (three-dimensional) geometry of the knot positions.

This project was published on piel.skin the first paperless architecture book EVER!.
pp 110-112