Changsha Olympic Sports Centre

Changsha Olympic Sports Centre is a "one stadium, two arenas" civic sports complex: a 65,000-seat main stadium, an 18,000-seat multi-purpose arena and a 4,000-seat swimming and diving hall, on a 65-hectare venue zone with a 140-hectare coordination zone around it. The estimated construction cost is around NZD 1.5 billion. Eight teams entered the international design competition, delivered as a consortium bid between two design institutes working as one team.

I owned the delivery of this bid end to end: the plan, the people, the coordination, the quality standard and the cost, together, not any single lever on its own. A separate chief design lead owned the design concept; my ownership was of the process that turned that concept into a deliverable, competition-ready scheme within a fixed twelve-week window.

For HENEX, this case shows R18 applied to a delivery process rather than a screen or a building: a complex, multi-institute bid sequenced into clear stages so the team always knew what to understand, decide and produce next.

The firm had no separate "owner" title, so the project-manager role carried that function in practice. Alongside a separate chief design lead who owned the concept, I owned the process, the people and the delivery: planning, resourcing, coordination, quality and cost. I was not the concept lead and not a hands-on technical designer.

I organised a core team of six to seven architecture specialists and coordinated supporting structural, MEP and façade engineers. My management style was escalation-based rather than hands-on: I let the team run, and stepped into detailed coordination personally only when someone flagged a blocker they could not resolve themselves.

I was the single point of contact with the partner institute, coordinating upward with the chief design lead on concept direction and downward with the team on blockers and resourcing needs. I chaired our internal coordination meetings as the meeting host, setting the attendee list, the agenda and the pace.

Day to day, this was as much about supporting the team as directing it. I mentored the architects, checked in on what each person needed to keep moving, and found the resources to unblock them, stepping into detailed coordination myself only when someone raised something they could not resolve on their own. Holding a compressed, two-institute bid together depended on this as much as on any schedule or budget.

Alongside planning, coordination and quality, I managed cost as one further discipline. I negotiated the fee-share split with the partner institute, then broke the budget down per node into headcount by discipline and hard-cost items, including a fixed render count with a small agreed float, around ten renders, plus or minus one or two.

I used scenario planning across three possible outcomes, not shortlisted, shortlisted, and winning, so the resourcing and cost response to each was already decided rather than improvised under pressure. Most international competition bids run at a financial loss for the firm; disciplined planning across all of these levers together, not cost control alone, delivered a rare net-positive return on this one.

The scheme's three venues, the 65,000-seat stadium, the 18,000-seat arena and the 4,000-seat aquatics hall, sit within four core public spaces: a celebration plaza, the professional venues themselves, a commercial green valley, and a sports park. Layered public viewing platforms wrap the stadium at multiple heights, so the site works as a riverside public space on non-event days, not only as an event venue.