Stockholm Olympic Stadium, Sweden, Architect - Grimshaw

This design was for an entry for Stockholm Olympic Stadium Olympic Bid.
The organizers had implied that they wished to have an 80,000-seat stadium for the 2004 Olympics. After 3 years they proposed that they would like this structure to be removed and replaced with a 20,000 seat indoor arena where possible re-using as much of the original stadium.

This proved to be a challenging problem but eventually a design was produce that re-used all the original components largely without alteration. The resultant arena building was very much an evolved form. By using computers to ‘evolve’ a solution it was possible to ‘fold’ the stadium closed much like flower petals. Once the arena roof was finely tuned it was opened back out and the stadium structure was then re-evaluated and fine tuned once more. This series of iterations eventually produced two distinctly different buildings using one set of components.

images copyright GRIMSHAW