Herzog & de Meuron's stadium in Chelsea "will be a hefty brute of a thing"

2015-07-07T01:28:00-04:00

The stadium will be wrapped in a cage of slender concrete and brick columns that will rise to a zig-zagging profile, before folding over to form the roof – as if the architects’ tangle of struts in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium had been straightened out and neatened up.

Herzog & de Meuron's design for the Football Club stadium in Chelsea takes fandom to the level or religious zealotry, borrowing dramatic gothic elements from Westminster Abbey – the structure that formerly stood on the same site. The design's heavy masonry, brick and railway-style vaults prompt comparisons to "London's Victorian railway viaducts" and the Brutalist concrete hulks of the 1970s. As Jacques Herzog in The Guardian explains it, the stadium will be like “a castle, or a medieval walled village ... It is really a structural thing, very naked in some way."

The £500M stadium should support crowds from 42,000 - 60,000, and while Herzog & de Meuron have already completed numerous arenas (perhaps most famously, their "Bird's Nest" stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics), the Chelsea project's heft offers an aesthetic break from the ongoing sweeping, airy trends in stadium design.

More on Herzog & de Meuron's stadium work:

Bird's Nest Collaborators, Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron, s...

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Herzog & de Meuron's stadium in Chelsea "will be a hefty brute of a thing"