/ 21 October 2009

Soccer City highlights African design and ingenuity

The 89 000-seater, calabash-inspired Soccer City highlights African design and ingenuity, listed construction company Aveng said on Wednesday.

The company together with its subsidiary Grinaker-LTA was celebrating the roof wetting and the start of the final completion inspections of Soccer City.

”We are immensely proud of this landmark development… this was achieved with one million disabling injury free man hours — an unprecedented achievement under such tight deadlines,” Aveng CEO Roger Jardine said.

The company was committed to sustainability beyond the actual construction of the stadium, he said.

”Soccer City has contributed R512-million worth of procurement investments to broad-based black economic empowerment companies and
a total of 4 700 job opportunities for the local community,” he said.

According to Mike Moody, Grinaker-LTA project director, building the stadium required 90 000 cubic metres of concrete, about 10 000 tons of reinforcement steel, nine million bricks and 13 000 tons of structural steel.

The structure has a double layer of fabric roof and required 32 400 fibre cement panels to complete the calabash-inspired design of the façade.

”It has taken some 9 980 000 hours to complete the construction of Soccer City, since the project’s inception in 2007,” Moody said.

Grinaker-LTA managing director Neil Cloete said the initial idea was to complete Soccer City with a simple roof.

However, the organising committee had asked for ”a meaningful African design”.

”It is incredible to have witnessed the transformation of the site into what will be a landmark for the country and the continent
at large,” Cloete said.

Every seat in the stadium had an unrestricted view of the pitch and the grounds, with the furthest seat 105m from the centre of the pitch.

There was a total of 193 suites and roughly 2 700 seats dedicated solely for media and 860 parking bays and 77 concession kiosks were included within the grounds.

Soccer City will host both the opening and final matches of the 2010 Fifa World Cup.

”It is by far the largest stadium in Africa. It is also the biggest all seated stadium ever built for any football world cup event,” Cloete said. — Sapa