Stadion Kaliningrad – construction description

New stadium for Kaliningrad is being built on the October Island. It’s a very intriguing location. Despite its picturesque layout it’s also problematic and also expensive to deliver large buildings there due to wetland ground basis.

Dispute over location was one of the reason to delay the groundbreaking by many months. A much more serious issue was the abandonment of initial concept as the design firm working on it went bankrupt in 2013.

Design had to be changed anyway, because building a stadium with retractable roof and planned infrastructure proved beyond financial abilities. Since early estimates put average group stage stadium cost at RUB 10 billion it then went to 15 billion in 2014 and later even that amount turned out to be insufficient. Despite drastic cost-cutting effort the building is now priced at RUB 17.5 billion.

Eventually, after further delays, groundbreaking officially took place on September 11, 2015. This is when piling officially began and more than 7,000 piles are expected to be stuck into the ground in order to provide a stable basis for foundations. Actual stadium structure is expected to begin growing in early 2016. With rapidly decreasing time and FIFA deadline of 12/2017 the stadium was simplified to the maximum and is expected to be ready in time.

The building was initially planned for 45,000 people with 20,000 temporary seats and roof that would lower after the temporary zones are dismantled. However FIFA gave green light to make it much less impressive. With 35,000 it will be smaller than actual FIFA requirements (40,000 net capacity), while 10,000 seats are still planned as temporary.