Kerbala Stadium – “The Kerbala Arches” proposes a football venue that fuses Kerbala’s historical, religious, and architectural heritage with a distinctly contemporary identity. The architectural concept is anchored in a powerful local symbol: the pointed arch, referenced from the city’s sacred architecture and reinterpreted as the project’s primary megastructure.
A ring of 16 intersecting arches (approximately 38 m wide and 19 m high) forms a protective perimeter and supports a system of tensile canvas roofing. This intermediary structure operates as a threshold—an outer “transition” space before entering the stadium—bringing multiple benefits: solar control, the fragmentation and activation of public space, efficient crowd flow and evacuation management, and the potential for commercial/football-themed zones around the venue.
Inside, the bowl is organized into three seating tiers for a total of 33,301 seats, paired with clearly distributed vertical cores and circulation/evacuation axes. The design also integrates key complementary functions—VIP and press areas, restaurants, commercial spaces, and a press center—consolidated to clarify routes and operations on match day. Orientation follows FIFA shading logic to reduce afternoon sun exposure.
