An all-timber football stadium designed for the Forest Green Rovers Football Club by Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) in 2016 has received local approval in Gloucestershire, England. 

The proposed stadium will anchor the new £100 million Eco Park development that will bring the 5,000-seat stadium, a community accessible football pitch, and a collection of offices and retail spaces to the area. The stadium component of the project is billed as the world’s first modern all-wood soccer stadium, while the project backers aim to make the development run entirely on sustainably generated energy.

A project statement on the ZHA website states, “The design retains and enhances the existing meadow landscape of the site whilst adding the stadium and other functions for the town. Embodying low carbon construction methods and operational processes, it will be the first all timber football stadium with almost every element made of sustainably sourced timber including its structure, roof cantilevers and louvered cladding.”

According to the site, the stadium’s timber structural modules are spaced closely together to allow for the seating area floors located above to also be made of wood. The seating areas are designed to bring spectators incredibly close to the field, with the closest seats resting roughly five meters from the playing field. The steeply raked seating design provides for unobstructed views of the field, according to the architects. 

The project was delayed for nearly three years due to concerns regarding the development’s impact on traffic, the site, and other local concerns; those concerns have been assuaged through a variety of measures that include adding translucent cladding to the stadium canopy to minimize the structure’s appearance on the horizon.  

Regarding the project’s material innovations, Dale Vince, Forest Green Rovers chairman, said via press release, “The importance of wood is not only that it’s naturally occurring, it has very low embodied carbon – about as low as it gets for a building material. And when you bear in mind that around three quarters of the lifetime carbon impact of any stadium comes from its building materials, you can see why that’s so important – and it’s why our new stadium will have the lowest embodied carbon of any stadium in the world.”