Aviva Stadium

The collaborative process of detailed design development and production of construction documentation between architects and structural engineers was enhanced through the use of a shared parametric model used for development and definition of the steel roof structure, steel cladding supports, cladding envelope and floor extents. The stadium envelope design was highly constrained by site boundaries, rights to light, air traffi c regulations and planning restrictions. Underlying geometric considerations for the early design were rule - driven. As the project entered the design development phase, the team anticipated changes and adjustments to the constraints and therefore used an integrated technology that could easily accommodate and communicate variation between the architects and engineers. Any changes in external surfaces defined by the architects were issued to the engineers and then the structural geometry and corresponding structural steelwork analysis would automatically update. A parametric approach meant that the geometrical confi guration of the stadium could be numerically controlled, removing the need to manually edit and rebuild geometry when a change occurred.

Source: Liddell, Ian and McCormick, Fergus (2012) Special steel structures in Steel Designers' Manual: The Steel Construction Institute, Seventh Edition (eds B. Davison and G. W. Owens), Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK