Bryant Priest Newman has replaced our hallowed tradition of lumpen sports design with an elegant, stylish and surprisingly cheap structure.
With its £2m Eric Hollies stand at Edgbaston, Warwickshire County Cricket Club has cut loose from the great British tradition of heavy sports stadium roofs with ham-fisted detailing. But neither is the roof one of the new generation of tensile-fabric canopies. Instead, a series of delicate rectangular plates with shimmering metallic soffits seems to hover over the crowd below.

The design, by young local practice Bryant Priest Newman Architects, manages to combine simplicity and elegance with a remarkably low cost – the 5900-seat stand was built for £350 a seat, one-third of the benchmark price.

As cricket is a summer sport, the architect conceived of the canopies as slender sun parasols rather than sturdy shields. "The concept for these elements was to provide simple, flat, thin planes that conceal the simple structure above," says director Mark Bryant.

The 100 m long stand has been articulated into four identical rectangular sections that crank their way round the eastern edge of the pitch, with staircases filling the wedge-shaped gaps between them. All four sections are shaded by their own canopies, and the architect, with structural engineer Price & Myers, hit on the idea of splitting each canopy into two, with a 3 m gap to lessen wind uplift.

The thin metallic canopies are set at a 7° pitch, lending the stand a sporty, aerodynamic quality. The cricket club insisted that advertising panels be prominently displayed on the roof, and the architect has skilfully integrated these into the design by fixing them to the rear canopies and designing them to resemble aircraft wing-flaps.

The lower tiers of seating are supported on a concrete structure cast on top of an earth embankment. The upper tiers are made of precast concrete planks supported on the steel masts.

Costs were kept down by using repetitive elements based on standard sections. The elegance of the concept and the finesse of the detailing belie the fact that the stand was built in seven months, on a design-and-build contract to which the architect was novated.

Credits

Client Warwickshire County Cricket Club Architect Bryant Priest Newman Architects Structural engineer Price & Myers Quantity surveyor Francis Graves Design-and-build contractor Interserve Building