Suncorp Stadium

Stadium Event

Brisbane's redeveloped Suncorp Stadium opened in June 2003 to an enthusiastic reception from fans and players. With a seating capacity of 52,500 the new facility is the headquarters of the Brisbane Broncos rugby league team and venue for several matches in the 2003 Rugby World Cup.

Already Suncorp Stadium has successfully hosted capacity crowds for a Rugby League State of Origin match and the August Australia vs South Africa Rugby Test.

The redeveloped venue has an integrated seating bowl instead of separate grandstands. It boasts extensive members’ facilities, corporate suites, a team merchandise shop, office space for the sporting codes and stadium management. There are 2,180 dining spaces, four corner terrace open air bars and over sixty food and bar outlets. Community facilities such as an indoor basketball/netball court, gym and crèche extend the building’s use beyond major sporting events. Such features have become the norm for state-of-the-art venues.

The choice of which venue to develop and the evolution of Suncorp from the home-grown Lang Park into a world-standard football stadium has not been without controversy. The client (State Government), architects (HOK Sport+Venue+Event in association with PDT Architects), building contractor (Multiplex and Watpac as the Lang Park Redevelopment Joint Venture) and operator (Ogden IFC) have had to balance the often conflicting demands of sports organisations, players, fans, local residents and businesses.

Like the airport and the shopping mall, the stadium has become one of those hyper-real typeform spaces of the late modern world. Step off a plane into an air-conditioned airport terminal, out of a dim car park into an over-lit mall crowded with cubicles of merchandise, or pass through a stadium’s turnstiles to behold a playing pitch and crowd. Hamburg? Hong Kong? Los Angeles? You could be anywhere.

The total inward focus of the shopping mall, spatially and commercially, never allowed much room for architectural expression or engineering prowess. But airports and stadia have increasingly become stakes in games of inter-metropolitan and international rivalry. Increasingly they have had to bear the weight of political aspirations and ambitions for regional economic regeneration, with an iconic visual presence being part of the package. Of course, Olympic stadia have for a long time been architectural showpieces. But most sporting venues have until the last decade been unpretentious functional places. As sport has become more closely entwined with corporate sponsorship, the stadium has increasingly taken on civic status. HOK Sport+Venue+Event, with offices in London, Brisbane and Kansas City and more than forty stadium projects worldwide over the last decade, has been a major contributor to the rising status and visual presence of the stadium.

No longer just a playing field and spectator stands, the stadium has become an integrated entity within the worlds of corporate entertainment and commodified leisure – with dining rooms, bars, members’ lounges, corporate suites and tightly specified media facilities. Add in forecourts, purpose-built transport hubs, links to nearby urban facilities, and a stadium becomes a generator of major urban restructuring. This is very much the story of the redevelopment of Suncorp Stadium. But the price of this sophistication can be the kind of homogenisation cultural critics have labelled as hyper-reality.

The extent to which Suncorp Stadium is not an iconic statement is therefore a measure of its success. This policy of restraint was partly a response to community consultation. Understandably, local residents did not want a monumentally overwhelming structure on their doorsteps. Minimising local environmental impacts has been an important theme of the whole project. Sports lighting is enclosed within the stadium, suspended on a gantry below the flat steel roof, thus minimising light spill into surrounding areas. A service road for heavy vehicles is located beneath the stadium to reduce noise and disruption to local roads.

Another important environmental requirement of the brief was that no large-scale car park would be built on-site, which meant spectators would have to use public transport or walk. To provide incentive, the cost of public transport is included in tickets, and spectator parking is not permitted within a two kilometre radius of the stadium on event days. Instead of a car park, a new bus station was built at the southern end of the stadium, a pedestrian walkway to nearby Milton station was added, and other pedestrian links were upgraded.

The rectangular pitch has been mirrored by a rectangular structure. This could have appeared monolithic, but measures have been taken to counter this. The corner sections are glazed atria, while the facade is carefully layered to break down the scale of the building. Notable are the recycled timber slats (milled from ironbark and spotted gum sourced from former wharves) mounted on powdercoated steel frames to form giant screens. They are positioned in front of large glazed areas enclosing dining and reception areas, assisting in minimising solar heat gain, thus reducing air conditioning loads.

Air conditioning was able to be eliminated in some of the spaces where it would normally be used, specifically, the corporate and members' reception areas. This was achieved via the use of a ventilated facade that relies on ‘the stack effect’, the timber screens and additional sun blinds on the west facade.

Queensland’s sub-tropical climate and outdoor lifestyle have informed the design of the whole facility. Inside the stadium are open air terraces and viewing galleries, outdoor barbecue grills and bars. The seating bowl itself has been designed to maximise cross ventilation of the seating area and pitch. In the upper tier, the corners have been left open, directing breezes around the seats, as well as visually breaking up the box-like form of the stadium.

The prospect of the stadium’s expansion may have been welcomed by fans and players, but it was a different story for local residents, who feared that increased spectator noise would plague their neighbourhood. So the need to manage noise was driven from contrary directions – retaining atmosphere for the fans while reducing impact on the neighbours. The successful design solution was a low, flat, continuous steel roof, forming a vast ‘verandah’ overlooking the pitch.

This continuous roof provides shelter from sun and rain for 70 percent of the seating. Furthermore, the opportunity that such a large roof area offers for rainwater collection has been used to good advantage. The roof water discharges into box gutters which drain to a syphonic downpipe system that directs the water into two 200,000 litre steel tanks under the stadium, where it is drawn on for watering the pitch. This significantly reduces the facility’s draw on mains water supply.

The redeveloped Suncorp Stadium represents a culmination of the history of ‘Lang Park’. The slow organic process of development ended as soon as visions of redevelopment were sanctioned and master planning began. So while the cauldron atmosphere has been retained and enhanced to continue the Lang Park tradition, other demands of the project have irrevocably altered the place itself, despite promotional claims of minimising footprints and blending in with the surrounding area. Stadium design, at its most basic, is an architecture of crowd control. The need to provide rapid but safe ingress and egress for over 50,000 people has generated large concrete plazas to the north and south, which inevitably make the stadium an island.

The linear arrangement of palm trees and a few other crow-resistant species in the northern plaza hardly constitutes ‘parklands’ as claimed by promoters. On the other hand this plaza does connect well with the restaurant precinct of Caxton Street, and also provides access to the soon-to-be-opened public basket/netball court and gym in the stadium’s northwest corner. So perhaps like the Lang Park of old, the open space will gradually be taken over by different activities and the place will take on a life of its own.