The team comprising Zaha Hadid Architects working with architecture and engineering consultancy Sweco and landscape architects Tredje Natur has won the competition to build the new Aarhus football stadium in Denmark.

Bringing supporters as close as possible to the field of play in a single-tiered seating bowl creating an intense match-day experience, the new Aarhus Stadium is embedded within the city’s Marselisborg forest.

Titled the “Arena of the Forest”, the design concept is informed by the vertical rhythm of the surrounding trees that reach up to 47m in height. The design envisions the new stadium as an extension of the forest with its verticality continued in the stadium’s public colonnades and the timber ribs of its façade. These vertical gestures flow from the forest towards the landscaped plaza and into the colonnades of the stadium’s external and internal concourses. Together with an intricate hierarchy of timber ribs within the façade and roof, the stadium’s large horizontal volume is subdivided into a human scale whilst at the same time offering a sense of arrival for the fans congregating in the adjacent public plazas.

The new stadium’s roof is designed to maximise weather protection and increase comfort levels in the adjacent external plazas as well as the internal concourses, defining a sheltered 360-degree public circulation route that is independent from the events within the stadium; creating welcoming new public spaces for a wide variety of civic, recreational and cultural uses by the local community and visitors to the park.