MK Dons stadium ready for new season

Steelwork erection has recently been completed for the new 30,000 seat capacity stadium for the Milton Keynes Dons football club, with the facility scheduled to open for the 2007-08 season in August.

Rowecord Engineering has erected more than 4,000t of structural steelwork for the project and is currently installing the last remaining sections for the adjoining 5,000 capacity arena.

The stadium features a groundbreaking architectural structural steel design, says Sinclair Knight Mertz, engineers for the project.

The company says the main driver for the design was to create the illusion of the canopy roof over the seating to appear as a floating disk over the stadium.

The structural design solution needed to rely on elegance through simplicity and so the hovering disk appearance was achieved through an innovative development of the standard cantilever steel roof form.

Rowecord says this was done by using cantilever trusses to span the 35m above the terraces, and combining the use of square and circular hollow sections to give the most economical solution in terms of design and fabrication.

Meanwhile, the four sides of the roof are linked through a weave of slender tension only bracing members which efficiently perform multiple structural functions.