#Translucent panels minnesota professional#

Professional sports teams share their space for special events and musical concerts.

Large stadiums are no longer reserved just for sporting events they are multi-faceted destinations. Each new stadium brings more advanced technology and more efficiencies than the last. No matter the location around the world there are commonalities in overall design results, and they are the comfort and experience of the individuals in these stadiums. Stadium and arena designs have changed over the last 15 years. Bank Stadium field is so bright, with 60 percent of the roof being transparent, allowing in natural daylight. Some of the individual Texlon ® ETFE panels are over 110m long (300 feet), resulting in a significant reduction in the weight of the supporting structure. Taylor was joined on that trip by Edward Peck, a vice-president and facade specialist for Thornton Tomasetti, the Chicago structural engineering firm for the stadium.It is easy to see why the U.S. There's Allianz Arena in Munich as well as a couple of soccer stadiums in New Zealand, where Taylor visited shortly after HKS got the Minnesota project. The Water Cube in Beijing, used for swimming at the 2008 Olympics, became the largest building to incorporate ETFE. One of the ETFE pioneers was the founder of the German company Vector Foiltec, which was selected as the manufacturer for the US Bank Stadium roof. Tested to withstand weather from hail to hurricanes, ETFE began to be used in the 1980s for structures like shopping malls, zoos and schools, primarily in Europe.

ETFE was originally developed by chemical company DuPont in the early 1970s as aeronautics insulation. There are a handful of ETFE buildings around the United States, like a train station in Anaheim, an amphitheatre in Kansas City, and a water park in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., but this will be the biggest. We think the perception of sitting in a facility enjoying a game when it's either raining or snowing outside and still feeling like you're experiencing an outdoor stadium is going to be phenomenal.' 'This'll be one of those well-recognized buildings in the industry. 'The easy way out would have been a simple roof,' said Kevin Taylor, the senior vice-president at HKS Architects who's managing the project for the Dallas-based firm. The memory of the Teflon-covered Metrodome, cozy and quirky but dingy, was still fresh. With high-definition televisions at home serving as stiff competition for ticket sales in a northern climate where sunny autumn afternoons are savoured, natural light was a high priority.

The transparent roof on the south side will be complemented by five 95-foot-tall pivoting glass doors on the front of the building, letting actual fresh air in on warm days. 'Clear is the new retractable,' said Vikings executive vice-president for stadium development Lester Bagley, repeating a slogan coined as the design was revealed more than two years ago. So the Vikings entered a new era of transparency: The $1.076-billion (U.S.) US Bank Stadium will open next season, boasting the only ETFE roof on a sports facility in the United States. The retractable roof would have cost more, but the Vikings realized through researching other NFL venues that roofs are rarely retracted enough to make them worth the extra expense. Public financial support for the project was never going to prevail unless the facility was usable year-round for a variety of events, so an open-air stadium wasn't a viable option. The space-age product, scientifically categorized as a copolymer plastic, lets in light like glass would. Sixty per cent of the colossal venue, some 248,000 square feet of it, will be covered solely by this transparent material called ETFE.

Translucent panels minnesota