The Spanish La Liga champion is internationally perceived as the club that plays beautiful football, the club that is owned by its fans, the club that fights for equality, the club that represents a city and an entire region, and the club whose values can be summed up in one word recognisable the world over – ‘Barça’.
The Barça brand appeals to fans internationally, and two million people each year visit the club’s home to experience the museum, buy the merchandise and tour Camp Nou – the iconic stadium the club has called home since 1957.
But despite this popularity, the club wants more. Operating in an ever more competitive battleground with the world’s most popular clubs – including rival Real Madrid, which is planning a stadium expansion and overseas theme parks – Barça’s board reached the conclusion it has no choice but to expand.
“We don’t have the luxury of ignoring other sources of revenue anymore,” says Jordi Moix, one of the club’s elected board members and the commissioner in charge of the club’s expansion dreams. “We’re an institution that wants to take advantage of its brand. If we want to remain independently owned and avoid raising season ticket prices and selling players, then we must create new value streams.
“We did it years ago by opening our museum, but we have so much potential to do more. It would be a sin not to,” he said.
While most football clubs dream of expansion, Barça has two precious commodities that make its ambitions feasible: ownership of 20 hectares of development-ready land in Les Corts, and a brand that can attract significant investment.
Moix and the board have imagined something particularly ambitious: a whole new Barça district surrounding Camp Nou, described by club president Josep Maria Bartomeu as “the most important sports project in Europe and the world.”
Espai Barça – a new district for fans
Espai Barça, or ‘Barça Space’, will be a pedestrianised, landscaped boulevard for all things Barça. The district will integrate with the city 24/7; a new neighbourhood of restaurants, cafés, sports facilities and the club’s museum, hotel and megastore.
“This is an open space for everyone,” says Moix. “We want to liberate this space for the neighbourhood. Espai Barça won’t be like an amusement park where you have to pay to enter. We’re a social club and we’re part of this city. It doesn’t make sense for us to build fences.”
The club hopes the result will be “every Barça fan’s dream” – a place they can call their own which will increase the club’s engagement with fans, its revenue and the value of its assets, boost sponsorship, improve conditions for its athletes, achieve environmental sustainability and generate activity 365 days a year.
At the heart of the project are three major infrastructure changes. Camp Nou will be completely revamped at a cost of €360m – with a new roof installed and capacity increased from 90,000 to approximately 105,000. A further €90m will be spent on building a new Palau Blaugrana, a multi-purpose arena home for the club’s basketball, roller hockey, handball and futsal teams, as well as an ice rink. Finally, the club’s Mini Estadi – a small stadium that hosts the club’s B-Team, women’s and youth sides – will be demolished and rebuilt alongside the club’s training facilities in a suburban district at a cost of €12m.
Alongside investments in parking, leisure amenities and community facilities, the total project cost will reach €600m.
Winning over the fans
Unlike a lot of developments overseen by sports clubs and franchises, the Espai Barça project has grown out of intense collaboration with supporters. The club’s 140,000 members, known as socis, gave their feedback on the proposed project, and sought assurances about its funding and viability, before being given the opportunity to vote on it in a special club referendum held in April 2014.
Over 70,000 members took part, with 72 per cent voting in favour. And with that, Espai Barça began to take shape.
One of Moix’s first tasks was to bring in a technical director to steer the project. William T. Mannarelli joined from sports and entertainment project management firm ICON Venture Group to oversee the development of a masterplan – designed by local architect Albert Blanch – and find the studios to build Camp Nou, the New Palau Blaugrana and the New Mini Estadi.
“Ever since the start of this, we’ve been doing things very differently than is the norm, but this is the Barça way,” Mannarelli tells me besides a giant model of the new Camp Nou at an exhibition the club has set up in the shadow of the stadium to explain the project to the public.
Firstly, international architects – including Bjarke Ingels Group, Populous and Wilkinson Eyre – were asked to find local Catalan partners to collaborate with, in what Mannarelli calls “arranged marriages which combined international muscle and local finesse.” The idea was to generate designs that recognised Barça as both a global entity and “the church of Catalonia.”
The design pairings were then given “tremendously long briefs” outlining in detail the concept, the site, the bigger picture and the financial restraints.
“Instead of giving them the brief and saying ‘see you in three months’, we decided to host workshops and be available to answer their questions,” says Mannarelli. “Each studio was given a fixed budget and reminded about feasibility, because we didn’t want to fall in love with any buildings we couldn’t afford.”
At the end of the process, Mannarelli’s technical committee reviewed the entries and submitted its recommendations to a jury of five FC Barcelona members, three members of Catalonia’s architecture association and a city council representative.
One by one this year, the winners were announced. Catalan firm Battle i Roig would design the New Mini Estadi. International architects HOK and Barcelona studio TAC Arquitectes would design the New Palau Blaugrana. And finally, announced at a press conference full of pyrotechnics and bombast – Japanese architects Nikken Sekkei and Catalan firm Joan Pascual – Ramon Ausio Arquitectes would redesign Camp Nou – a project combining “Catalan roots and Japanese vision”.
“The solutions we have chosen are the best at integrating Barça’s past and our future,” reflects Moix, now that the dust has settled. “The feeling I get is we’ve been successful in our choices. But now we have the task of explaining these designs to the public and winning their support.
“In Barcelona, everybody, in their soul, is an architect just as everybody in their soul is a football coach. This means there is pressure to get things right. As a board, if we get this project wrong we have to answer to the club’s members.”
Catalan roots, Japanese vision
Joan Pascual, local partner on the Camp Nou design team, certainly understands the pressures of redesigning Camp Nou. A Barcelona fan all his life, he first visited the stadium on a freezing cold day in 1961 to witness a bad defeat to Real Madrid, and “marvelled at the enormity of it all”.
Later, Pascual became an architect; designing educational buildings, social housing and shops rather than stadiums – until now at least – and for a time worked as an assistant professor to Camp Nou’s creator, Francesc Mitjans, at Barcelona’s university of architecture.
“I knew Mitjans, I know his work and I understand his spirit,” he says. “Importantly, I know his stadium. This understanding was a key element in our design for the new Camp Nou and our starting point was revision, not reinvention. There’s something about the soul of Barça that is special and has to be understood to build a stadium like this.”
When the competition to design the stadium launched, Pascual sought an international firm with the expertise and experience to partner on the project with his firm. After considering options in Europe, he remembered a chance meeting at a Tokyo social housing conference in February 2015 with directors from Nikken Sekkei. It was a serendipitous moment for them all.
“They invited me to their offices and established contact and showed me their work – including stadiums,” Pascual remembers. “When FC Barcelona started the competition, I thought of them on the other side of the world. So I suggested the project to them, and very happily they accepted.”
“Since then, we’ve had a lot of face to face interaction. There’s a language barrier, but we have translators and we’re speaking architect to architect, so we have a shared language in the same ways doctors in Beijing and London speak the same language. For us, it’s the language of drawings, sections and models.
“The design has certainly benefitted from this collaboration. Now it’s very difficult to say who had what idea. It’ll be the jewel in the crown of the Espai Barça district; an open space that acts as a gateway to the rest of the district.”
A Mediterranean stadium
The Camp Nou envisioned by the pair is a perfectly symmetrical ground – topped by a new 47,000sq m (506,000sq ft) semi-transparent roof – with a 360-degree perimeter partially enclosed by a glass façade at ground level. Twelve towers surround the stadium, allowing access to the upper floors. Interior concourses are protected by pitched eaves and will be free of barriers. On the upper floors three sky rings surround the outside of the stadium, featuring food and beverage points, seating areas and an open space for walking, relaxing and socialising.
It’s a design the jury hailed “open, elegant, serene, timeless, Mediterranean and democratic.”
“We’re very happy to receive this kind of comment, because it reflects exactly what we were aiming for,” Nikken Sekkei’s project manager Tadahiko Murao tells me from the studio’s temporary office hastily set up a few miles from Les Corts. “Now we’ve won the competition, we have to deliver. It’s very big for our practice, maybe our biggest project in some ways.”
Murao, and the stadium’s chief designer Takeyuki Katsuya, speak with quiet but evident excitement and passion about their winning design, and regularly explain aspects of the design by pointing at the jazzy renderings which take up every corner of their makeshift meeting room.
“We want to make a stadium of equality for all the fans,” says Katsuya, “and we want to make a Catalonian stadium, not only an FC Barcelona stadium. However, we’ve found expressing Catalonia is a very difficult challenge, particularly for political reasons. In the end we’ve achieved it by focusing on the climate of the Mediterranean.”
Katsuya and his design team first visited Camp Nou on a warm and pleasant day – quite unlike Pascual’s first experience of the stadium – and were soon imagining how they could place as many facilities outdoors as possible.
The result in the design is three striking sky rings, which will have seating areas with views over the pitch, the city and the sea. The Mediterranean theme continues with the roof, which is designed to reflect light as it changes throughout the day and will be illuminated in the club’s colours in the evenings.
“We’ve been very inspired by Barcelona’s real and rich history,” says Katsuya. “The sun and the sea, the historical buildings, the beautiful architecture. We wanted to reflect all that.
“We think about context for all our stadium designs. In Asia, we consider very different concepts, based on a different history, context and climate. But even though the inspiration is very different, the global technology and approach we have is the same.”
The biggest innovation, Katsuya says, is the extensive open space planned around the stadium. Amenities typically found in an interior concourse will be placed outside, with the floor rising to fold over them in polygon shapes “like origami”.
“We thought if we created a traditional concourse, it would disturb the flow and continuity between the building and the wider Espai Barça district,” he says. “We analysed the movement of people, and we decided to take away the concourse altogether. We’ve removed the walls and gates to truly open up the stadium and integrate it with the wider leisure district.
“People can come to Camp Nou on a match day and have a day full of excitement – visiting a café, the museum, enjoying the game then going for a meal after.”
Creating these experiences is the club’s ultimate goal.
“Our job – our mandate in fact – is to create an infrastructure that reflects this amazing brand,” says Mannarelli. “It’s like you come to Barcelona for the food, the architecture, the beautiful people and the weather. It’ll be the same with Espai Barça. You’ll come to the campus to see and experience a different type of club – a club which plays beautiful football and does things in its own unique fashion.
“Instantly you will think ‘ah... this must be Barça. This is what I came here for.”