Below is an excellent video explaining the stadium’s history and future plans. It mentions the structure’s origins as part of the 1976 Olympic Park, with some of the original concrete integrated in the 2008 built soccer stadium and the need to preserve a historic sightline of the Olympic Stadium.

The stadium’s 2008 build was funded partly by the Saputo family, owners of the Impact, who donated $7.5 million to the $17 million total cost (those are Canadian dollars, folks). That construction left the stadium looking like this:

Photo by abdallahh on Flickr

A further $23 million, provided by Quebec’s government, is now being spent to transform Stade Saputo into venue fitting for today’s MLS, as the Impact take the jump from lower league to North America’s first division. This work includes installing 3,500 seats in a new west grandstand, 1,000 additional seats in the east grandstand and 1,250 in the southeast and southwest corners, while new roofing will cover much of the stadium. The number of suites will also jump from 16 to 40. The stadium will continue to have a natural grass surface.

The new Saputo Stadium was designed by Provencher Roy + Associés Architectes. Below are their renderings of the finished home for the Impact:

Here are the latest construction photos from the Impact’s Facebook page:

Construction is expected to be completed by the summer of 2012; the Impact will begin MLS play nearby at “the Big O” (Montreal Olympic Stadium) in the spring before moving back into their enhanced soccer specific stadium.

In Moscow’s Petrovsky Park, one of Russia’s largest development projects is set to begin construction early in 2012 on a possible 2018 World Cup venue, known as VTB Stadium and Arena.

Why the odd-looking shape? Well, the plan for the development includes a football stadium that will become Dynamo Moscow’s new home and an indoor arena that will both be slotted inside the historic facade of Dynamo Stadium, opened in 1928. The new stadium rotates the football pitch’s orientation from east-west to north-south.

Below is the historic old Dynamo Moscow stadium, now demolished – apart from the facade’s constructivist-era architecture, preserved yet set to be somewhat submerged under the new stadium and arena in a manner rather reminiscent of Soldier Field’s renovation in Chicago.

You can see in these renderings how the new stadium and arena will fit over the existing stadium perimeter:

In the video below, the architects of the original winning bid for the development – Erick van Egeraat and Mikhail Posokhin – showed how the new stadium would fit into the park’s historic area (though it’s worth noting major changes have been made from the renderings for the final development).

The new design – by Kansas City-based David Manica, formerly of Populous – can be seen in this video, with the retractable roof removed, amongst other changes:

The stadium will have a capacity of 33,000, expandable to 45,000 if VTB Stadium is selected for the 2018 World Cup – it is competing with Spartak Stadium for the second of Moscow’s two hosting venue slots for the competition (Luzhniki Stadium has already secured the first spot).

Let’s take a look inside, where there has been some criticism of the planned distance between the pitch and the stands:

VTB Stadium and Arena will be flush with VIP facilities. 6,750 club seats and no fewer than 98 suite boxes along with a stage end restaurant, conference and meeting facilities in the main stadium are joined by 82 suites in the indoor arena.

The indoor arena has a base capacity of 12,000, expandable to 15,000, with configurations for ice hockey, basketball and concerts.

The overall development also includes significant retail and commercial areas, indoor training facilities for football, hockey, basketball, fencing, boxing and gymnastics, a five-star hotel, conference center, swimming pool, apartments, offices and 2,000 underground parking spots.

The total cost for the development is somewhere in the region of $450 million for the stadium and arena, and over a $1 billion further for the entire project including its expansive retail element (with 650,000 square feet of commercial space, much of it underground).

Most of the funding will come from VTB Bank, 85% owned by the Russian government, who have taken on American stadium development giant AEG to assist with the final design and construction. VTB Bank is also the majority owner of Dynamo Moscow, the stadium’s main tenant, though it does not own the hockey team (UHC Dynamo) or the basketball team (CSKA Moscow) likely to play in the indoor Arena. Construction is expected to be complete in 2016.

Fulham Football Club recently announced they would be staying at their historic home, Archibald Leitch’s Craven Cottage, and today released plans for expansion at the stadium with a major development to the Riverside Stand that would increase the Cottage’s capacity by a little over 4,000 seats to 30,000.

The stand’s design, which will need to go through a laborious planning application process, aims to be graceful and subtle enough to fit in with the surrounding trees and riverside way as well as the existing architecture of the stadium.

Compare the existing stand:

With the rendering of the new stand, which Fulham say is “sympathetic in scale to the trees to the south.”

Fulham have gone to some lengths to emphasize how the development of the stand will improve the riverwalk, with a new walkway featuring dining and recreational areas:

Unlike the present stand, the new stand aims to mirror the river’s bend. Compare the present….

With the projected new stand’s shape…

Inside the stadium, a new concourse would generate some nice extra revenue for the club, with new restaurants, bars and retail facilities.

Fulham aim to build over the existing stand, removing the pillars to improve views on the lower stand, along with the addition of a new upper tier.

Fulham will be submitting their planning application to the local council in the early weeks of 2012. Their own surveys suggest overwhelming support for redevelopment of Craven Cottage amongst their own fans, and they will need their support politically to help move the project forward. We’ll keep you posted on developments.

This week the design for Atlético Madrid’s new home was unveiled.

The new stadium will be built at the current venue known as Estadio La Peineta, much further from the heart of Madrid than Atlético’s historic home, Vicente Calderón Stadium, opened in 1966.

A track and field venue with a capacity of 20,000 built in the 1990s, Estadio La Peineta is an existing venue that is undergoing a massive rebuild and expansion to hold up to 67,500 spectators.

The move has come in for some criticism. In terms of design, it’s rather awkwardly shaped together, oval above the rectangular lower tier. According to the club, the stadium can be adapted to install a running track with a view to Madrid’s 2020 Olympic Games bid.

Here’s a 3D visualization of the new stadium:

As well as the design, criticism arises due to the geographical move that will take Atlético considerably further from the city center than at present, with the resulting demolition of their existing home.

That move – and the sale of the more valuable urban land their old stadium stands on – is funding the new stadium’s €200 million cost. Atlético’s stadium literature focuses in particular on the added space the move will give the club (the area covered will almost triple) and the new VIP facilities to be put in place. Atlético will be much richer in terms of the revenues they can potentially generate, but poorer in terms of their historic identity.

Work is already underway on the Estadio La Peineta rebuild, though Atlético do not expect to move into their new digs until 2015.

Update: this video shows how the stadium will come together, including with a running track for the Olympic games.

It’s been a little while since we revisited our lost stadium plans series, but prompted by a query from @BundesligaUK on Twitter, we couldn’t resist dusting off a relatively recently dreamt up design concept for one of the world’s most famous stadiums: Barcelona’s Camp Nou.

The above extravagant makeover for Camp Nou was created by Foster and Partners, led by Norman Foster, most famous in the sporting world for the redesign of Wembley Stadium. Foster’s plans fell victim to Barça politics and an era of relative austerity, with the club’s presidency changing hands from Joan Laporta, who had initiated Foster’s project, to Sandro Rosell.

Certainly, Foster’s vision was enormously expensive, with the renovations coming in at an initially estimated €300m. A roof and an expanded capacity of 106,000 – increased from 98,000 – were only the most obvious items of expenditure in a design originally unveiled for the stadium’s fiftieth anniversary in September 2007. Most striking was the polycarbonate and glass exterior.

Foster’s colorful design had some critics frothing at the mouth, seeing it as an exemplification of an architectural fad for rainbow designs that screamed loud gaudiness at the expense of architectural complexity.

“Even Norman Foster, whose tonal range until recently began at white and ended at taupe, has begun designing buildings as if he’s dropped acid,” Tom Dyckhoff wrote in the Times of London. “His Camp Nou stadium for Barcelona FC is a multicoloured daisywheel. When a bloodless modernist such as Foster starts getting all hippy-chick, you know that something strange is happening.”

Certainly, Foster’s interior renderings did little to dispel that concern; anything but Barcelona’s bright colors are almost impossible to discern.

The remodeling was supposed to have been completed in time for the 2011-12 season, but has been shelved indefinitely; talk of an expansion of capacity still continues at Camp Nou – particularly as the stadium is desperately short of luxury suites compared to its pan-European peers – but Foster’s bright design is unlikely to ever see the light of day.

Finally, we will leave you with something less colorful but no less dramatic in its own way, courtesy of mallboy on Flickr. Pictured below is an earlier Camp Nou expansion project from the 1980s that also fizzled: one presumes the binoculars would have been provided for the spectators in the steep fifth tier…

The opening game of Euro 2012 will take place at Warsaw’s new 58,000 capacity National Stadium, now almost completed. It will also host two other group matches, a quarter-final and a semi-final.

The stadium’s architects are German firm gmp, who produced the two-tier design with a retractable roof, 55,000 regular seats and 64 VIP boxes. Below are gmp’s renderings.

Stadium construction began in the fall of 2009. The outer fixed roof is made of 55,000 square metres of firm PTFE coated glass fabric, while the inner retractable portion’s material is the more flexible PVC coated polyester fabric spanning 11,000 square metres. The retractable roof is held up by 6 radial cables that have 960 suspending points.

Photo by alexanderson on Flickr

Photo by JB007 on Flickr

Photo by arkur's this and that on Flickr

The metal mesh panels cladding the stadium are, of course, in Poland’s national colors.

Photo by alexanderson on Flickr

The stadium is being constructed on the site of Stadion Dziesięciolecia (Tenth Anniversary Stadium), built in 1955 from the rubble left by the wartime Warsaw Uprising, and itself the largest stadium in Warsaw until it became derelict in the 1980s and was turned into an outdoor market. This video gives a good sense of its history in photographic slides:

The cost of the stadium is a reported €500 million, funded by the national government. Yet delays due to accidents (with three fatalities), failed safety inspections and rising costs mean the stadium is now several months behind schedule to open. Here’s the stadium last winter:

Still, the new stadium is now rising grandly above the Vistula river, a mile or two from the center of Warsaw.

Photo by kcharnick on Flickr

Photo by Vincent A. on Flickr

Photo by Jaroslaw Marciuk

The stadium’s seating is in place, and it’s now just waiting for the installation of its natural grass.

Photo by chlac on Flickr

Finally, a look from the air:

With the assistance of Chinese funding and construction, Zambia is about ready to unveil its newest stadium in Ndola, the southern African country’s third largest city.

As with Libreville’s new stadium in Gabon and elsewhere, China’s African diplomacy is fitting out sparkling new sporting infrastructure. Anhui Foreign Economic Construction Company built the new 40,100 capacity multi-purpose stadium for $65 million. The stadium design is reminiscent of others funded by China around the world, such as Costa Rica’s Estadio Nacional.

Around 200 Chinese workers joined roughly 1,000 Zambians on the project, with the handover scheduled to take place soon – though it has been delayed since the original intended date, October 24th, Zambia’s Independence Day due to issues with the telecommunications system.

Perhaps ironically, the new stadium in Ndola replaces one with its own diplomatic history: it’s being built on the site of the Dag Hammarskjold Stadium, named after the former United Nations Secretary General, demolished as long ago as 1998 with several stadium projects since having failed to come to fruition. Hammarskjold was a strong supporter of Zambian independence, achieved in 1964, three years after Hammerskjold was killed in a plane crash just outside Ndala. He is still remembered fondly in Zambia today.

The stadium has been named after Zambia’s former president, Levy Mwanawasa, who died in 2008 and had initiated the project with the Chinese.

The new stadium’s construction, begun in September 2009, has not been without problems:  construction workers staged a strike in October complaining about unpaid wages, and one said that their wages had been reduced after being told “too much money may kill them.”

The stadium’s construction was struck with tragedy in April 2011, when a fire killed two construction workers. Anhui Foreign Economic Construction Company donated $2,000 to the victims’ families.

Zesco United, of Zambia’s FAZ Premier Division, are expected to play at Levy Mwanawasa stadium, though no tenancy agreement has been announced yet.

Zambia hopes to win hosting rights for the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations, with the Levy Mwanawasa Stadium at the center of those plans. A new stadium is also being constructed in the capital Lusaka, and there are also plans for a new stadium in the coastal city of Livingstone.

For reasons too obscure to this observer to discern, Porto Alegre’s nominated stadium for the 2014 World Cup is not Arena do Grêmio but Estádio Beira-Rio, which would be fine if it wasn’t for the interminable delays at the latter and the smooth progress with the former that make the choice increasingly difficult to accept.

This is how the new stadium in Grêmio will come together:

The stadium will have a capacity of 60,700, including 4,000 standing, though that area (behind the goal) can also be converted to temporary seating for a slightly lower all-seater capacity.

The design is by Brazilian architectural firm PLARQ. The new stadium is part of a larger complex that will also include a hotel, shopping center and 5,300 parking spaces.

The new stadium will replace Estádio Olímpico Monumental as the permanent home of Grêmio, one of South America’s leading club teams.

The progress so far on construction can be seen with this recent aerial video:

Porto Alegre has already missed out on hosting the Confederations Cup in 2013 due to the lack of progress at Estádio Beira-Rio. Will Arena do Grêmio have to come to the rescue for the city and end up hosting the World Cup in 2014 after all?

Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, perhaps best known for the Allianz Arena in Munich and the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, are responsible for the design that aims to be light yet classical. Its clusters of supporting columns may remind some of Brasilia’s new stadium, though its shape is radically different. The interior is – well, pretty standard these days.

The stadium will be the permanent home for club team Girondins de Bordeaux, with a capacity of 43,000. Bordeaux won its last Ligue 1 title as recently as 2009. They currently play at the 35,000 capacity Stade Chaban-Delmas, and expect to move to their new home in time for the 2015-16 season.

The total cost of the stadium’s investment will be €219 million ($303 million), the bulk of it shouldered by the club and private investment via a financing package totaling €114 million. The rest of the stadium’s funding comes in the form of public subsidy from state, city and regional authorities. The cost of the stadium’s construction is €166 million.

The stadium is, as you’d expect, multi-purpose. Here’s its proposed concert configuration:

A consortium of companies led by VINCI Construction France will be responsible for construction, while VINCI will also be responsible for upkeep and maintenance of the new stadium once complete.

When construction gets underway, we’ll return with some juicy pics.

Continuing our tour of 2014 World Cup stadia, we head today to São Paulo, and look at the stadium in which the World Cup will kick-off in Brazil. It will be known as São Paulo Arena for the World Cup, with naming rights otherwise still to be determined. 

It will also be the permanent home for famed Brazilian team Corinthians; following the World Cup, it will be downsized from a 68,000 capacity to 48,000, a more suitable size for the club who currently play at the 40,000 capacity Estádio do Pacaembu. The temporary seats fit into the gaps at either endline shown in the renderings. Here’s how it will work:

A look inside the future stadium:

The new stadium is being built at a cost of $483 million in Itaquera, a district in the east of São Paulo. Financing is private for the bulk of the cost, excluding the temporary seating.

The selection of São Paulo Arena to host the World Cup’s opening game has not come without controversy. It’s not ideal for host nation Brazil, who will then head northeast to Fortaleza for their second game and play their third game in Brasilia – covering 2,436 miles traveling between the three cities, though that’s hardly São Paulo’s fault.

The new stadium’s design, by Anibal Coutinho, has not blown many people away as a stage for the World Cup to open at: functionally attractive it might be, stunning – not particularly, in my view at least.

Let’s take a look at the progress of construction so far, a perennial concern for most of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup builds. The start of construction was delayed as modifications to the design were made so that the stadium met not only FIFA’s general requirements to be a World Cup venue, but to meet the specific criteria to be an opening game arena, including the need for capacity to exceed 65,000. Work began only in May 2011, but big strides have been made quickly, as the below recent photos from the stadium’s construction company Odebrecht show:

Indeed, there is a pitch – and there has even been a goal! The date of completion for the stadium, originally scheduled for mid-2013, has now slipped dangerously into early 2014.

Arena Pantanal in Cuiabá, the capital city of Brazilian state Mato Grosso, will host four games at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, all in the group stage.

Cuiabá is located at pretty much the bullseye on a map of South America.

Currently under construction, Arena Pantanal will have a capacity of 42,500 for the 2014 World Cup.

Interestingly, the stadium’s construction is aiming to be carbon neutral, with one measure towards this goal coming with 1.4 million trees to be planted along the tributary rivers of the Pantanal wetland system, in order to offset the 711,000 tonnes of carbon to be emitted during the stadium’s construction.

The trees in the corners above are another element of the stadium’s green credentials: the stadium’s landscaping has already included the planting of 3,200 trees, and the stadium is one of four of Brazil’s twelve 2014 World Cup venues aiming to receive LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).

Arena Pantanal is being built on the site of the city’s now-demolished Verdão stadium, a 40,000 capacity venue opened in 1976. Here’s the demolition of its towers:

Following the World Cup, the plan is to downsize Arena Pantanal to a 28,000 capacity venue more suited for tenancy by one or more of the local clubs in Cuiabá, none of whom play in Brazil’s top division.

World Cup:

Post-World Cup:

Construction is well underway, ahead of the schedule of some its fellow 2014 World Cup venues, though it was not selected by FIFA to be a venue for the 2013 Confederations Cup.

FIFA announced last week that Arena Pernambuco, a new 46,154 capacity stadium under construction in the city of Recife, Brazil, will host five games at the 2014 World Cup - four group stage games and one round of 16 matchup.

Recife is located in the northeast of Brazil, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the country. It’s the capital city of the state of Pernambuco, and hence the stadium’s name.

The anticipated cost of the stadium, designed by Brazilian architect Daniel Fernandes, is around $300 million, and is part of a larger development project that also includes restaurants, shops, cinemas and 6,000 parking spaces in an area about 12 miles from Recife’s waterfront downtown.

Rising construction costs and delays led to a recent FIFA inspection, and Recife was one of two cities out of six selected for the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup given “conditional” status for the competition, pending completion of work that has been slow-paced until recent months. In response, the governor of Pernambuco, Eduardo Campos, “guaranteed” the stadium’s completion in time for the Confederations Cup – one that won’t be helped by ongoing labor disputes at the construction site.

Brazilian company Odebrecht is responsible for the stadium’s construction, along with the remodeling of the Maracanã Stadium and reconstruction of Fonte Nova Stadium in Salvador amongst its work on the 2014 World Cup venues. Funding is coming jointly from Odebrecht and the Pernambuco state government.

Once complete, the stadium will be managed by AEG, the first of two inroads into Brazil via the World Cup for the giant American company. It will then become the home of Clube Náutico Capibaribe.

Here’s a time lapse video of the work on the stadium’s construction up to mid-August this year:

In Odessa, Ukraine, FC Chernomorets Odessa will soon have a new 34,858 capacity stadium, though it will, perhaps surprisingly given the quality of the construction, not be a venue for Euro 2012.

The stadium’s exclusion from Euro 2012 is a shame for tourists, who will miss out on visiting Odessa, one of Ukraine’s jewels, the neo-classical hints of the exterior matching much of the city’s architecture. Ukraine’s football federation chief blamed Odessa’s mayor for the decision.

It was initially thought that the new stadium would be known as Prokopenko Arena, after the club’s former Soviet-era star player and coach who died in 2007, but it is now more likely to be named after a sponsor or simply known as Chernomorets Stadium – the same name as the club’s previous stadium.

Just this month, turf began to be laid down, as the stadium nears completion.

The stadium is expected to open in November, and we’ll return there when it does.

In Baku, the capital of oil-rich Azerbaijan, a 65,000 stadium is under construction that will be the home for the nation’s football team. It’s known as the Baku Olympic Stadium, due to the country’s bid for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.

The stadium’s design is supposed to evoke the Olympic rings, with the five parts to the fragmented outer shell able to illuminate in the Olympic colors.

The stadium’s interior, designed by Turkish architectural firm Toca, features a curved two tier structure. Though being built to FIFA standards, it of course features a running track for the Olympic bid.

Some of the most striking parts of the complex’s design are actually outside the main stadium itself, particularly the information center:

Groundbreaking took place in June 2011, with FIFA’s Sepp Blatter cutting the ribbon.

Funding for the project comes from the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), one of the world’s richest companies. SOCAR is headquartered in Baku, nestled onto the Caspian Sea.

We’ll keep you updated on the progress of construction, with completion of Baku’s Olympic Stadium currently anticipated in 2015.

In northern France, one of the country’s largest football stadiums is rising in Lille, a 50,157 capacity home for Lille OSC – Grand Stade Lille Métropole. It is expected to be a Euro 2016 stadium.

Lille’s new stadium will feature a retractable roof suitable for its northern European climate:

The stadium’s anticipated cost is €263 million ($359 million), with an additional €61 million ($83 million) for the surrounding complex, funded by mixed public-private investment. The main question mark surrounding the stadium will be how often Lille can fill it – their current temporary home, Stade Lille-Metropole, holds only 18,000, and their average attendance last season in Ligue 1 was 15,904. That said, a shiny new home ought to grow that number considerably.

With a retractable pitch, the stadium can convert to host indoor sports with a 30,000 capacity, as well as three concert configurations with capacities of 56,000, 40,000 and up to 25,000.

It was only on 29 March 2010 that construction began on the stadium following several months of earthworks, but progress has been remarkably rapid.

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Photo by Max Lerouge

Photo by Max Lerouge

Photo by Max Lerouge

Completion of the Grand Stade Lille Métropole is expected in mid-2012. Construction photos courtesy of the official Lille stadium site.