Designed for the 2015 African Games this 60,000-seat athletics and field sports stadium forms the centrepiece, of a masterplan of buildings, including an indoor arena, aquatics centre, ancillary facilities and various outdoor venues.

An important goal was for sports complex to be an enduring facility where sport and leisure activities could interact to enrich traditional culture and experience of the city’s inhabitants.

A key objective was that the stadium in its world-class design, ecological features and high standard of facilities would enhance Brazzaville as a city and the Republic of the Congo as a country.

The stadium’s profile was designed as an elegant ‘bowl’ wrapped in a ‘golden façade’, a dramatic external skin of subtly striped golden metallic cladding. To reduce the impact of the building’s overall mass, it was broken into a series of ‘closed’ segments separated with ‘open’ light and ventilation slots.

This strategy allowed the stadium to respond directly to Brazzaville’s equatorial climate. The light and ventilation slots allows filtered light to penetrate, while discreetly located louvres at high level assisted air flow. Over-sized vertical blades on the lower section of the entire perimeter were designed as ‘gills’ to allow the building to breathe.