Most of the world’s great stadiums are built within city suburbs, between motorways and extensive carparks. The Santiago Bernabéu is the exception given its location in the heart of the city, adjacent to one of Madrid’s principal arteries dominating an increasingly dense urban fabric since 1947. Despite its challenging site the stadium has become a powerful city symbol and is part of the overall collective memory connected to football.
Project Name: The remodelling of Santiago Bernabéu Stadium
Studio Name: L35 Architects
Location: Avenida de Concha Espina, 1, Madrid, Spain
Completion date: 2024
M2 built after renovation: 175.000m²
Client: Real Madrid
Owner: Real Madrid
Landscaping: Porras La Casta Arquitectos
Photography: Miguel de Guzmán, Real Madrid
After numerous refurbishments to increase its seating capacity and general modernisation the current remodelling project started in June 2012, when the team composed by L35 Architects, in collaboration with GMP and Ribas & Ribas, came up with the winning proposal for the competition sponsored by Real Madrid.
The winning project sees in the challenge of this commission, an opportunity for the transformation not only of the building itself but its relationship with the users, the neighbourhood and the city. A recalibration of the relationship between the building, the streets, redrawing the pedestrian routes and more adequately integrating all the different activities from sporting, commercial and leisure as well as site specific uses including its status as a socio-cultural destination capable of attracting millions of visitors yearly.
Experts in mixed use projects, L35 Architects comfortably accommodates Real Madrid’s new approach towards diversification of uses in the stadium. This approach has been already applied in other sports infrastructures such as the Simón Bolívar Stadium in La Paz or the Campín Sports-Cultural complex in Bogotá, which feature the incorporation of leisure, cultural and commercial activities, in a proposal that maximises its integration with the immediate surroundings and city life.
A main objective of the competition proposal was to give the stadium a public entrance, kind of a lobby towards the city. The existing stadium had 57 doors but not a main entrance. On the Castellana side, east facade, the plaza was levelled in order to generate a main entrance to the stadium beneath the new facade’s large overhang. The design of the entrance below the overhang on the Paseo de la Castellana provides a public facade and entrance from the city side: the grand lobby of Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. This architectural solution provides the stadium with an iconic presence that establishes a strong link with the city.
On the opposite side, the west façade, we generated a new plaza facing the Plaza de los Sagrados Corazones, a square that acts as an antechamber to the other the main access to the stadium. At this plaza, the basement vehicle access was resolved through the addition of mounds that have a triple function: they camouflage the access ramps, hide the ventilation stacks between vegetation and generate a green wall that occupies the central void of the plaza thus transforming it into a new public space protected from the surrounding traffic, which itself serves for events or as a meeting point for fans before games.
The diversification of uses is matched with radical new improvements in the stadium operations. The new logistics tunnel solves servicing through a gallery threaded between the existing foundations. This new tunnel allows for a more efficient operational servicing for the entire stadium without disturbing its regular functioning on match or events days.
A new permeable and changing façade
As a main proposal for the competition we had a “flexible” façade that could adapt to everything that needed to be contained. Imagining a new Santiago Bernabéu involved finding a new flexible cladding system, that could adapt to all the associated project variables. From the initial conceptual sketches the intention was to readjust the massing of the building to the city scale. Not as an afterthought, but a response to the client’s instructions to create a strong visual image for the Bernabéu, as a new city icon.
The geometry of the new envelope is not accidental. Its curved surfaces reflect light in a changing way: Its soft curved edges express dynamism. But the arrangement of these curves and cornices produce in the façade a new perception of the building at pedestrian level, in such a way that the volume is slowly revealed when the width of the street forces a close view, and expanding when distance allows for perspective, the stadium needs to dominate and visually organise its environment. At the same time, the shape of the envelope adapts to the needs of the new programme, expanding or receding without losing its unity.
The cladding is not conceived as a hermetic armature, instead it is more like a light permeable steel skin which, through the parametrisation of the façade panel system, includes openings that allow light and air to pass through, facilitating the required natural ventilation for the correct functioning of the circulation galleries. The idea was to integrate the stadium with its context, by treating the façade as a subtle mirror that reflects its constantly changing surrounding activities. The reflective quality of steel together with the surface treatment creates this diffuse reflective quality over the façade. Together with the curve and its sinuous forms, the façade dematerialises which helps to reduce its apparent volume and better integrate with its setting.
