“It takes guts to do this,” says Royal Pineda, principal architect of Budji+Royal Architecture+Design, the firm designing New Clark City’s sports complex in Capas, Tarlac. This is the firm’s first time to design a sports facility, but seeing the different stadiums in Jakarta, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo gave Pineda and his team more confidence. “Because it’s all common sense. The IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) has written down all the technical requirements. It’s math. It’s science.”
The design team had three months to work simultaneously on schematic design and design development. It took three months for them to get the technical delegate’s approval and a month to work on the pre-construction documents. Meanwhile, the contractor had to start digging and building before the completion of the CD package, given only 12 months to erect the stadium.
During our team’s visit to the New Clark City construction site last May, the stadium and the rest of the complex had 94 days to go before the design and construction team’s internal deadline of 31 August 2019. This internal deadline, which all 8,000 workers, engineers, and architects are taking very seriously, is two months ahead of the official turnover on October 30th and three months before the 30th Southeast Asian Games begin on 30 November.
Here are some of the images we captured on our visit to New Clark City last May 29th.
The Athletic Stadium stands in a 73,580 square-meter site area, with a 25,000 square-meter footprint. It has a 20,000 seating capacity, with 21 rows of seats.Budji+Royal’s design concept for the Athletic Stadium takes inspiration from Mount Pinatubo’s caldera or crater, represented by the charcoal-gray roof.The Stadium’s roof spans 34 linear meters, and is 19.35-meter tall at the apex.The roof is made of sandwich or insulated roofing panels.“The frames of Pampanga lanterns inspired the Athletic Stadium’s columns. They’re actually braces for the roof and the structure. They carry the seats and the roof,” says Pineda.There is no rainwater collection system at the stadium. Rainwater from the downspouts will flow to a catchment area, then on to Cutcut River.The undersides of the bleachers and the metal stringers supporting them show through. There are a total of 14 main stairs for both entry and exit points and seven gates for exits and secondary entryways.Pineda says that they wanted to “make things lighter,” a deviation from the typical heavy and enclosed stadiums that the team visited during their design development. They lifted the roof higher to allow thorough cross ventilation.“Aside from it being honest and looking good, it works well,” Budji+Royal principal designer Budji Layug (left) answers BluPrint when asked which aspects of the Athletic Stadium he is particularly proud of. “All the science and the guidelines have already been tested. We followed that, and added our soul, the originality, the design, the atmosphere of it. And we were able to do it in a way that falls within the budget, within the timeframe.” Pineda (right) adds that all the specs in the competition and the playing field were treated sacred, but the overall design remains relevant and “truthful” to the place, and to the Filipinos.“It’s good to see all the benchmarks, but we also wanted the license to change many things. And the technical delegate from the IAAF said, as long as it does not affect the competition area and it’s within the Philippines’ standards of building codes, it should be okay,” says Pineda.
Read the full-length article on the Athletic Stadium and see exclusive photos in BluPrint’s Volume 2 2019, available in newsstands nationwide, on Flip100, Magzter, Lazada, and Amazon.
