Fútbol! Barcelona Football Club: Dream-Building with MicroStation. Olé!
Hans Max Gamper-Haessig
You can almost hear the deafening roar of 100,000+ excited fans cheering already. The energy in the stadium is virtually palpable. In admirable homage to their fans and supporters, the Barcelona Football Club has embarked upon an impressively enormous remodel and rebuild of their home-ground complex, Camp Nou, located in Barcelona, Spain. We’re impressed by how they’ve relied on CAD and BIM to realize their dream and also how they’ve collaborated with Bentley to achieve their vision of the future. So, what exactly does MicroStation have to do with one of the most successful sports clubs in the world?
One doesn’t have to be a soccer fan to have heard of the Barcelona Football Club. What Americans and Canadians call soccer, the rest of the world calls football, or fútbol, or footie. And Barcelona ranks right up there with the very best of the best, for more reasons than merely their outstanding skills on the field, but let’s kick off with some facts.
- Barcelona Football Club was not founded by some global tycoon with oodles of cash. It was founded back in 1899 by a Swiss student who (a) happened to be in Spain to learn Spanish and (b) was passionate about football. Young Hans Gamper founded the club so that he could organize matches himself, regularly. Gamper’s passion ignited others and resulted in what is, today, one of the most remarkable football clubs in the world.
- Not only did the founding of the club having nothing to do with a Mr. Moneybags benefactor, but in true democratic style, its fans wholly own the club. There are over 14,000 members who decide its destiny and how it’s managed.
- No other team in Europe has won the domestic league, domestic cup and European Cup in a year, more than once. Ever.
- The Camp Nou stadium is home to the Barcelona Football Club and is the biggest football stadium in Europe, holding 99,354 fans, which is approximately 10,000 more than Wembley Stadium (the second largest stadium on the continent) in the UK.
Originally built in the CAD-less era of the late 1950s, it wasn’t until more than half a century later that a decision was made to remodel the stadium between 2017 and 2021 at a cost of roughly $712 million. One can barely comprehend the scale of such a project.
Due to financial issues, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, construction was delayed and completion is currently estimated for 2024.
Team Sports: Collaboration with Bentley Systems
Camp Nou: Home-ground of the
Barcelona Football Club
The football club has been partnered with Bentley Systems since the remodel project was initiated in 2017 and, overcoming immense obstacles, it is, at last, finally under construction amid the pandemic. Well beyond the scope of simply revitalizing the stadium itself (if “simply” is even remotely appropriate given the scale of the project) and increasing the seating to 105,000, the project now includes upgrading streets in the surrounding neighborhood to mitigate congestion, ease access to public transportation and enable increased foot traffic.
“Bentley has been working with FC Barcelona on the Espai Barça Project (as the project is known) for over three years, helping the architects, the construction team and the club complete an extraordinary challenge — delivering a major renovation of the stadium while it continues to host matches,” said William T. Mannarelli, director of Real Estate & Espai Barça. “With Bentley’s SYNCHRO 4D construction-modeling software running on the Azure cloud, we can apply cutting-edge techniques to manage the complex and precise scheduling required to keep the stadium open during construction.”
Bentley’s ProjectWise, in conjunction with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Teams, has allowed Bentley’s users to safely work from home, if required, during the pandemic, while collaborating virtually on projects anywhere in the world.
The companies will further combine Bentley’s infrastructure digital twins expertise with Microsoft’s cloud technologies for:
- ProjectWise 365, a 100% Azure cloud-based solution that increases the speed and quality of infrastructure design collaboration, which will be available through Microsoft’s commercial marketplace.
- Bentley’s iTwins platform to leverage Microsoft’s Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT (Internet of Things) Hub, Azure Time Series Insights and other Microsoft cloud services, for users to rapidly store and process operational data.
Go Big or Go Home
The Barcelona football club motto sums it all up perfectly: More Than a Club.
The full scope of this massive project extends even beyond the remodel of the stadium and immediate surrounds. Included in this project is the building of an all-new Palau Blaugrana, a separate arena belonging to the Barcelona Football Club, which is located close to Camp Nou in Barcelona.
Currently seating 7,585 (and set to increase to around 12,000), the Palau Blaugrana arena is home to the basketball, handball, roller hockey, and futsal (a five-a-side ball sport played on a hard court) divisions of FC Barcelona.
Furthermore, an additional court with a capacity of 2,000, an ice rink, a new social area, a new commercial area, revamped Club offices, La Masía (the club’s youth academy) and an additional 5,000 parking spaces are in the cards.
One can almost envisage the veritable army of CAD and BIM professionals, dotted around the globe, working flat-out to pull off a project of such epic proportions. They are, no doubt, busily buried in MicroStation, Revit, AutoCAD and more to create, plan, visualize, cost, schedule and generally streamline this ambitious project. If you use MicroStation, Revit or AutoCAD and would like to increase and streamline their functionality while reducing your hours in the office, call us now at 727-442-7774 or visit us at AxiomInt.com.
At the end of the day, when the referee would normally give three sharp whistles to indicate end of play, imagine being able to pack up and go home instead of working evenings or weekends. After looking at Axiom’s offerings, you may find you want to go out and buy yourself a decent ref’s whistle to shake (or wake) things up a bit in the office. Alternatively, yelling, “Fútbol!” at the top of your lungs should do the trick. Take pictures of the results. (And send them to us.)
REFERENCES