14 NSC
October 19
© Hufton + Crow
SSDA 2019 A W A R D
Tottenham Hotspur Football Club,
New Stadium
The Premier League’s newest stadium has a 62,000 all-seater capacity and a
sliding pitch to allow it to host non-football events.
It takes some teams a season or two to
adapt to playing at home in a brandnew
stadium, but Tottenham Hotspur
made a seamless transition earlier this
year, winning its opening three fixtures.
The club’s new home, constructed on
a site that overlaps much of the old – now
demolished – ground’s footprint has been
designed as an iconic structure and a
benchmark for stadium design.
The stadium is a tight atmospheric
bowl, and feels and looks like a traditional,
albeit very modern, football stadium with
its single tier home end. All of this helped
Spurs feel immediately at home in their new
surroundings.
Maximising its use, the stadium features
a sliding pitch that will allow other events,
such as concerts and American football
matches to be held on a regular basis,
without damaging the important football
turf surface.
The construction of the stadium was
undertaken during a four-year programme,
which included the phased demolition of
the existing White Hart Lane ground.
The project team used structural
steelwork to form the majority of the
stadium, and the scheme included the
erection of five key steel features, that are
said to represent elegance as well as pure
industrial engineering and fabrication.
These steelwork elements, consist of
the East Stand Y-columns and transfer
structure; South Stand tree columns; South
Stand transfer structures; North Stand
cantilever structure, and the West Stand
atrium structure.
“The long span nature of many areas in
the new stadium are virtually unachievable
in any other common construction material
and the shapes and forms created using
steel are both elegant and robust,” says
BuroHappold Engineer Chris Shrubshall.
“Also, the construction programme
was such that steel provided a significantly
reduced erection period, to the point where
some areas were changed from concrete to
steel construction at a late stage.”
Supporting level three of the East Stand,
the Y columns were one of the first major
pieces of structural steelwork to be erected
at the new stadium.
They provide an atrium at the entrance
to the stand and reduce the number
of columns coming to ground level by
collecting a column on each branch.
They also allow the façade to be cut back
in to the building producing a dramatic
overhang.
Fabricated from plate steel forming
two box sections, with a clear gap between
them, the exact geometry of each Y column
varies on each grid. The separate box
sections are connected at the knuckle by a
single gusset plate.
Above the Y columns, an additional
level of transfer structure is provided in
order to create column-free space at level 3.
Formed by using sloping steel columns to
reduce the span and improve the dynamic
performance of the stand, the transfer truss
is two-storeys deep and spans 30m.
The South Stand tree structures were
created to provide an elegant method
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