AMBITIOUS Forest Green Rovers have revealed the winning design for their new stadium – and it will be made almost exclusively from wood.
Rovers, owned by green energy tycoon Dale Vince, received 50 designs from architects in the UK, France, Sweden, Germany and the United States.
They whittled it down to just two in July and have now announced that Zaha Hadid’s plans are the ones the club will push forward with.
Zaha Hadid have plenty of experience with sports facilities having been responsible for the 2012 London Olympic Aquatic Centre while they have also designed one of the stadiums for the upcoming World Cup in Qatar.
The proposed stadium for Rovers will be the centrepiece of the £100m Eco Park development beside junction 13 of the M5 in Gloucestershire.
As well as the new ground, grass and all-weather training pitches will also be installed as well as a sports science hub and a green technology business park with sustainably built commercial offices and light industrial units.
Rovers chairman Vince said: “Zaha Hadid have built some fantastic sport stadia around the world, including one at the Olympic Park in London; they’ve designed one of the five stadiums for the next World Cup in Qatar, and now they’ve designed one for Forest Green.
“The really standout thing about this stadium is that it’s going to be almost entirely made of wood – the first time that will have been done anywhere in the world.
“The importance of using wood is not only that it’s a naturally occurring material, it has very low carbon content – about as low as it gets for a building material.
“We’ve done as much as we can to make our current stadium properly sustainable, but we are limited with what we can do – it simply wasn’t built with the environment in mind. At Eco Park, we’ve started with a blank sheet of paper, and we’ll be going further than anyone has done before – this really will be the greenest football stadium in the world.”
Here's the view from the centre-spot at our proposed new stadium – designed by @ZHA_News pic.twitter.com/I4z19BtGzP
— Forest Green Rovers (@FGRFC_Official) November 3, 2016
