Designed to vanish: World Cup stadium 974
One of the seven stadiums that Qatar constructed for the World Cup will be demolished after the event.
That is what Stadium 974 in Doha, a port-side facility with more than 40,000 seats that was largely constructed from repurposed shipping containers and steel, has been described as by the games’ organizers. According to Qatar, the stadium will be completely disassembled after the World Cup and may be transported to nations in need of infrastructure. While praising the design, outside experts argue that more information is needed to understand what happens to the stadium after the event.
According to Karim Elgendy, an associate fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank who previously served as a climate consultant for the World Cup, “designing for disassembly is one of the basic concepts of sustainable architecture.”
He said that a lot of elements need to be taken into account “before we call a building sustainable,” adding that it allows for the natural repair of a building site or its utilization for another purpose.
Nearly 40% of global carbon emissions connected to energy come from buildings. About 10% of percent comes from “embodied” carbon, or the greenhouse gas emissions connected to the building-related processes of construction, upkeep, and deconstruction.
The treatment of low-paid migrant laborers who constructed more than $200 billion in stadiums, metro lines, and other infrastructure for the World Cup in Qatar has drawn condemnation from throughout the world. According to Qatar, the critique disregards recent labor improvements.
The only World Cup site that Qatar built that doesn’t have air conditioning is called Stadium 974, which is also the number of shipping containers that were utilized to build the stadium. The weather was notably hotter and more humid during a game on Friday in which Switzerland overcame Serbia.
Only nighttime games are held at the stadium since the weather is cooler then.
The goal was to avoid creating a “white elephant,” a stadium that is left underutilized or underused once the competition is over, as occurred after previous World Cups in South Africa, Brazil, and Russia, according to Fenwick Iribarren Architects, who also built two other World Cup stadiums.
