Project Management: Stadion Narodowy

The project of my choice is the construction of the National Stadium in Warsaw that has been build for this year Euro Cup in

Euro 2012 Official logo

football, which will be held in Poland and Ukraine. It is in my great interest, because football is my passion and also, because it is the first sport facility of this kind and size in Poland, my country. I will present a general overview of the construction process and talk about not predicted problems that always appear in big projects.

Building a big sport facility need a lot of time and a very good organization and cooperation of all the actors involved. I would like to point out those that were working on the project. There were 3 architecture companies, who developed the design, JSK Architekci, gmp International and Schlaich Bergermann Und Partner. The final design got accepted in February 2008. The construction process was divided into 2 phases. Pol Aqua made the 1st one, and Alpine Construction Polska, Hydrobudowa Polska S.A. and PBG S.A made the 2nd. The whole project was directed by the National Sport Center (Narodowe Centrum Sportu), which belongs to the State Treasury. Another actor, however not a direct one, was UEFA, which was pressuring to end the project by the end of 2011 to be ready for the Euro Cup that starts in June 2012.

Those 3 years seemed enough but as always a lot of problems came out during the construction process. One of the first obstacles was the fact that the new stadium was built literally on its predecessor spot. Because of that it needed a destruction team to prepare the construction area. Moreover, the former national stadium became in the end of the 80’ the biggest market in

How it looked before.

Europe (as you can see on the picture attached), so it was hard to deal with its vendors. The second problem was the terrain. It is situated close to the Vistula River, so the soil is very humid. It needed special pilling technology, which takes time and is very expensive. The pilling process costs covered almost 30% of  total costs, which amounted to 1.9 billion złoty’s, i.e. around €420 million. It was quite a big sum of money comparing it to Munich Alianz Arena that has a similar capacity and was build for €200 million. The last of the biggest problems were two very severe winters that delayed the construction by a total of 6 months.

The above-mentioned obstacles were hard to avoid and weren’t caused by people (the location is very good and it was a key factor for national authorities that were financing the whole project). Now I will show a couple of examples that will prove Einstein saying: “Human stupidity is infinite”, even if a serious national construction project is concerned.

The exteriors stairs were to be provided by a special supplier. Hydrobudowa Polska S.A. decided that it is going to be faster to make them outside the construction site, then deliver them and finally assemble them on place. The problem was that when the stairs arrived in the end of the winter 2010 the temperatures were still very low. The constructors decided to assemble them either way, regardless the risk that concrete do not react well with low temperatures. Couple of months later, during resistance tests, the stairs fell down because of the bad assembly techniques. It showed a lack of cooperation between constructors and project managers that haven’t checked if the stairs were properly settled. Fortunately nobody got hurt.

A second embarrassing situation happened almost at the end of the whole project. The polish design was based on the Johannesburg Soccer City Stadium. However, Stadion Narodowy has “only” an attendance of 58,000 and Soccer City has 95,000. The difference was in on the outside. The stadium in Poland looks like a white and red crown to keep national colors. The project in South Africa took into account a special space on the north side of the stadium for transmission cars and facilities. It was very good news for polish designers because on the north side of the polish stadium there was a lot of space. Unfortunately they haven’t thought about on thing. The transmission trucks in South Africa have to be pointing north, because all the satellites in space are orbiting the earth on the equator. Polish designers forgot that their country lies on a different atmosphere and it created a serious logistic problem to change the project.

This short overview of the biggest sport construction in Poland was to show you how it is difficult to go through a project without any failures. All along the construction a lot of different issues come out and it is impossible to predict them. This is why a very serious and detailed project management is needed to at least avoid those problems than can be predicted before. At the end i would like to show you a short video showing the whole construction process.

Pinche aquí para ver el vídeo

References:

1. National Stadium in Warsaw History – http://www.stadionnarodowy.org.pl/stadion/historia-stadionu/

Comments Off on Project Management: Stadion Narodowy / 13 Jan 2012 por Piotr Adam Lubiewa-Wielezynski
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