Olympic Stadium - iam

Mechanical
Buried under the stadium seating in the sports hall
and the swimming pool, 49 air-handling units are
served with hot and cold water from a central plant
located on the other half of the site. Additionally a
19km network of hot water piping was buried 25cm
below the grass surface of the stadium playing field
to allow year round use.
Experimenting
Since this project has been executed before our
current digital age, all of the calculations had been
done by hand. Most of the engineering was also the
result of practical experiments, mostly conducted by
Frei Otto himself, and based on models in varying
scales.
Otto started with models of the roof at a 1:125
scale. He measured the mechanical forces in the
individual wires of the net with gauges he had
developed himself. Several fixed cameras recorded
both the loaded and unloaded shape of the model
for comparative measurements.
As soon as these experiments offered the
necessary insight in how these constructions
worked and reacted, larger models were built and
hand calculations were performed for verification.
Therefore, architects and engineers used drawings
on a 1:10 scale, resulting in 3.800 sqm of drawings.
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