The new stadium is planned to be built on the left bank of the Oka at its confluence with the Volga, that is, on the famous Strelka, where the history of Russia's largest fair began. True, the football arena, which is designed to make Nizhny Novgorod a full-fledged participant in the 2018 World Cup, will be erected a little away from the former fairgrounds, on the site bounded by Samarkand Street and the continuation of Betankura Street, as well as the city park and the restriction zone now being projected on the site of the Nizhny Novgorod port Cathedral of Alexander Nevsky. And if the park is intended to ennoble the former industrial zone, then the stadium should become a new city-wide symbol, viewed from the water area of both rivers and harmoniously interacting with the cathedral in the panoramas of Nizhny Novgorod.
As the authors of the project say, working on a new sports arena, they, first of all, tried to find an image that could convey the spirit of the place and the atmosphere of Nizhny Novgorod with its fair traditions, cheerfulness and hospitality as accurately as possible. “Strelka is such a symbolic place and, in terms of urban planning, such a fertile place that any landmark could be placed here, a construction of the most incredible complexity, both in terms of plasticity and structures,” says one of the authors of the project, Andrei Asadov. “But we deliberately restrained this impulse and, on the contrary, tried to soften the silhouette of the future stadium so that it would harmoniously fit into the coastal panorama.”
Speaking about softening the silhouette, the architects are by no means exaggerating - expressive high-tech, to which these authors usually gravitate (suffice it to recall at least
the project of reconstruction of the stadium "Dynamo" or the project of a sports arena for Volgograd, besides the World Cup 2018), the most smooth lines are opposed here. In terms of the plan, the Nizhny Novgorod stadium is a wide oval, and the edges of the bowl have received a wave-like shape that favorably distinguishes the arena against the background of residential buildings and, at the same time, does not block the view of the cathedral. The dynamism of the chosen form is multiplied by the outer shell of the building invented by the architects in the form of a folded curtain structure. In fact, it will be assembled from aluminum or composite diamond-shaped panels, but outwardly it most resembles a fabric in which the transparent facades of the arena are freely wrapped. Above the entrances, the architects raise the shell, exposing the glass surface of the main wall - this is how a skilled seamstress carefully gathers the material in order to emphasize the dignity of the figure with the help of expressive folds. The chosen color gives the shell an even greater resemblance to the fabric - the architects use red, green, yellow and white colors to paint the rhombuses. What is not the attire of the heroes of the folk fair theater - at least this is the first association that comes to mind when you consider the visualizations of the project, in which a motley intricately twisted ribbon is inscribed in the panorama of Nizhny Novgorod.
The architects do not hide the fact that another great temptation was to offer a membrane covering as a shell of the stadium - fashionable, lightweight, visually win-win - but the architects know for sure that Teflon is not so perfect in the Russian climate, and most importantly, it is very expensive. Therefore, an alternative design was invented, better corresponding to Russian realities, both weather and construction: the enclosing walls of the arena is a system of L-shaped cantilever transverse frames with outreaches from 36 to 45 meters, located at a pitch of 12 meters around the perimeter of the stadium. The frames are attached directly to the reinforced concrete base of the stands, and the wall panels are assembled using a system of crossbars and half-timbered posts.
The layout and functional organization of the stadium are designed in strict accordance with the requirements of FIFA and UEFA. The plot itself is a rectangle in the plan, which the architects draw crossways and diagonally, and the resulting segments are allocated for parking lots intended for different categories of visitors (audience, athletes, judges, press, etc.). A circle is inscribed in the center of the rectangle, and its center, in turn, is the arena oriented along the north-south axis, around which several functional perimeters are "built up". The football field itself is surrounded by a ring of premises for match participants, technical and economic services, then there is the infrastructure of the spectator section - cafes, exhibition halls, shops, cloakroom and toilets, and then there are checkpoints and emergency services, a TV broadcast zone and a guest service town … As for the "stuffing" of the complex - from the outside, the architects surround it with several security perimeters, providing spacious areas for the movement of the public. At the same time, part of the parking lots that are vital for the stadium during the championship period can then be eliminated - the architects propose to use the areas reserved for them for the expansion of the park and investment construction. The project provides for the possibility of transforming the stadium itself: the number of spectator seats after the 2018 World Cup can be reduced from 45 to 30 thousand - for this, the architects propose to dismantle the second tier of the end stands, and convert part of the ground areas into multifunctional halls.
In the competition, the project, developed jointly by the teams of Mosproekt-2, Grand Project City and Asadov's Architectural Bureau, won by a wide margin - the experts chose it for its detailed elaboration, thoughtfulness of the compositional solution and the brightness of the architectural image. However, already in December, the press appeared
reports that the Nizhny Novgorod arena for the 2018 FIFA World Cup will be designed by the German GMP bureau. Whether this means that the results of the competition are actually canceled and the winners will be removed from the creation of a landmark object, it remains to be seen. At least, the architects themselves, who won the competition, still have no answer to this question.
