GSA-user Buro Happold Engineering’s work to expand the South Stand at Manchester City Football Etihad stadium South Stand was recognized as the best sport/leisure project in the 2016 Institution of Structural Engineer’s 2016 Structural Awards.

Project Details

The new 6000+ seat third tier opened in August 2015, in time for the start of the 2015–16 football season. Work on a third tier for the North Stand is expected to begin by 2017, increasing total capacity to around 61,000.

Designed to be in keeping with the existing roof design, the South Stand project involved modifying an existing cable-net roof – while providing continued rain protection to fans. It was described by the Structural Awards judges as a most impressive response to tricky engineering challenges.

These challenges centred on the development of a new design allowing alterations to an existing clad cable-net roof with complex geometry and load paths. The designers also had to flow the geometry of the new South Stand with the existing East and West

The Buro Happold response to the design challenges has been detailed in The Structural Engineer, Vol. 94 (2016) Issue 11. A thoroughly interesting read.

It was in flowing the geometry of the new South Stand with the existing East and West Stands that GSA Suite’s form finding came into its own. Armed with a transition surface by the architect, Buro Happold used Grasshopper to create a propped space-frame design with complex geometry that creates a smooth transition between the new and the old. Once the geometry was defined, Grasshopper was used to generate both a centre-line GSA model for optimisation and a Revit model for drawing production.