Cape Town Stadium
PROJECT INFO
World Cup Legacy Stadium: Cape Town South Africa (2007 – 2010)
Client: City of Cape Town
Architecture joint venture: Stadium Architects consisting of GMP Architekten (Berlin)/Louis Karol Architects (JV leaders during construction)/Comrie Wilkinson (Cape) Architects and Urban Designers/Jakupa Architects and Urban Designers/Paragon Architects/Munnik Visser Architects. The latter four practices were jointly constituted as Point Architects and Urban Designers.
The cool simplicity of the completed stadium’s form and the festivities surrounding an immensely successful 2010 FIFA World Cup belies the fiery trail it followed into existence. Apart from Henri Comrie’s challenging lead urban designer role, his then practice Comrie Wilkinson (Cape)* was part of a comprehensive joint venture team tasked with the ambitious role of designing and overseeing the construction of the 67,000 seat stadium. GMP (Berlin) were the lead design architects of the elegant, low-slung stadium. GMP’s local representatives, lead by the impressive young architect Robert Hormes, shared studio space with four local joint venture partners during the three years of planning, documentation and site supervision preceding the World Cup kick-off……a very finite date to which the whole world was invited and which could not be moved under any circumstance. Locked into this date was immense national pride and a determination to prove a chorus of local and international voices who predicted failure through incomplete stadia wrong.
This all resulted in the neccessary close collaboration and steep learning curves on a project of immense political and technical complexity.
* Note: Comrie Wilkinson (Cape) merged with Urban Studio to form URBA in 2013
See links to extracts from the book Cape Town Stadium: Between the Lines, below:
Essay by Henri Comrie and Khalied Jacobs: Urban Design – Beyond Object
