World champions in stadium design and construction
Volkwin Marg is world leader in stadium building with his Hamburg-based architectural firm Gerkan, Marg und Partner.
Volkwin Marg doesn’t like full stadiums. He likes visiting them most of all when they are completely empty – to appreciate their aesthetic quality. Volkwin Marg is one of the world’s leading stadium architects. He has produced designs for well over 60 arenas with his Hamburg-based architectural firm Gerkan, Marg und Partner (gmp) and two dozen of them have been realised. The most important are in Germany, Europe, Africa and South America.
Marg made a breakthrough ten years ago with his redesign of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium. The experts praised the “design fit for a metropolis” that also did justice to the site’s past. For the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany he also designed the arenas in Frankfurt and Cologne. With a moveable textile roof over the pitch, the stadium in Frankfurt is considered the “world’s largest cabriolet”. The arena in Cologne with its four luminous pillars has long since become a city landmark.
After the World Cup in his home country, commissions came for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the 2012 European Championship in Poland and Ukraine and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, where Marg designed the stadiums in Brasília, Belo Horizonte and Manaus. He realised his perhaps most beautiful arena there in the metropolis in the middle of the jungle. The oval stadium is enclosed in a large basket-like shape. The supports resemble the veins of a leaf. The tropical rain drains off its ribs. Arena da Amazônia is one of the first stadiums to be certified according to the strict criteria of the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard.
Volkwin Marg believes, “Stadium building today is what cathedral building was in the past. It is about an aesthetic of power.” At the beginning of 2014 his architectural firm won the competition for the redesign of Real Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabéu. The most famous football club on the planet wants nothing less than the “world’s best stadium” – built by Volkwin Marg.
Decision about the venue of the EUFA European Championship 2020 on 19 September 2014
