Stadium – Casablanca

Site : Casablanca, Morocco
Client : City of Casablanca
Program : Olympic stadium with 85 000 seats
Size : 120 000 m²
Partner : RFA
Date : competition 2011

 
Situated in the green belt surrounding Casablanca, the project aims to offer citizens an attractive, porous, and democratic destination, while catalyzing an area currently in development. The Grand Stadium is embedded into a densely programmed park that is deployed over the entirety of the site, covering and linking all the ancillary program spaces of the masterplan (conference centre, hotel, museum, etc…).
 
Inspired by Moroccan traditions and typologies, the Grand Stadium is conceived of as a tent in the landscape, a place of gathering, celebration, and conviviality. The tent wraps itself around the mass of the stadium, conceived of as a solid object from which the seating bowl as well as all the interior spaces are carved. The tent deploys itself in different ways around the mass of the stadium: covering and sheltering the interior seating bowl, filtering light into interstitial circulation spaces, extending out to cover an exterior public amphitheatre, unfolding to act as a screen for projected imagery, etc. With its passive and active environmental strategies inherent in the built forms, the project represents an innovative example of what a responsible and sensitive world-class stadium could become.