Mehler Valmex Membranes

The new Konya Stadium, located in Konya province Turkey, is designed with an approach of harmonizing the cultural codes with contemporary structure. Moreover, high technical featured materials used for this project make the stadium fit for different functions.

Green was the chosen colour… to represent the football club playing in the stadium. At the end, it even had to be greener than initially planned. The new Konya Stadium is a multi-purpose arena. It is part of a complex of sports venues on the outskirts of the city: the Konya Olympic Village. The stadium has a capacity of just about 42.276 people (all-seated) and is totally covered.

Designed as an Object

The Turkish planning team Bahadir Kul Architects from Istanbul succeeded in creating a design object in Konya, about 200 kilometres south of Ankara. One of the earliest examples of object design in stadia architecture is Pusan Dome in South Korea. One of the best known is probably the AllianzArena of Herzog de Meuron in Munich. In all three examples, the difference between roof and facade is completely dissolved. Hence, there is no more talk about buildings in the traditional sense, but rather of objects – objects with an enormous magnetism and lure that dominate entire cities.

Konya Stadium

The Roof

Mehler Konya Stadium

The roof is designed in one pour with the facade. Both elements feature green panels. The facade consists of differently shaped triangles that are filled with a variety of tensile materials – some translucent, some transparent. Most obvious are the green panels which reoccur on the roof. Here there is a three dimensional membrane structure based on arches. This was necessary to enable the wide spans over the stalls. Mehler provided the roof material as well as the green and translucent parts of the facade: VALMEX® FR 1000 Type III. Green and white are the local football club's colours. Therefore, the green is not just any green. As all colours look differently on various substrates, experiments were carried out until the right shade was found.

Mehler Texnologies
After the first panels were already installed, the club's authorities announced that even more green triangles were needed. Mehler's order management team hence demonstrated, how flexibly a supplier can respond to logistical challenges. The completion date for the stadium was not up for discussion.

Shel(l)ter

It is obvious that the quality of the coating determines the quality of the entire shell. The individual parts of the fabric are welded together. Therefore, the transfer of all forces depends on the adhesion properties of the coloured coating on the membrane.

Everything was finally resolved in the prescribed time frame and the stadium has been meeting and exceeding all the expectations for a year already.

With its green triangles, the stadium in Konya will certainly take its place in the well-known range of globally recognised stadia.