Guangzhou Football Park

Guangzhou Football Park is a purpose-built professional stadium developed to support China's future bids for international football tournaments. I worked as one of the Project Directors on the team that won the international design competition. On completion, the stadium is set to become the largest in China by seating capacity and the second largest in Asia.

My responsibilities covered the end-to-end process from competition to implementation, including concept design and storytelling, control of visual quality and user experience across the facade and key interior and exterior spaces, coordination with the client and multidisciplinary consultants, and detailed design and material selection for the roof and curtain wall.

For HENEX, this case shows how a project moves from a competitive pitch to a buildable, coordinated reality, and how holding a clear narrative across very different audiences, competition juries, the client, consultants and the construction team, shapes a project's outcome as much as the design itself.

I was part of the team that took this design through the international competition, contributing to the concept and the story we told the jury about why this design deserved to be built. Winning the competition was only the starting point. From there I carried a share of that narrative through schematic design, technical development and ongoing coordination with the client and a wide range of specialist consultants.

A central part of my role has been protecting the visual quality and user experience intent established at competition stage as the project moves through more technical phases. Facade design, roof geometry and key interior and exterior spaces all needed continued attention so that cost, structural and construction requirements did not quietly erode the experience the competition had promised.

This kind of role depends on translating between audiences, juries who respond to story and image, clients who weigh cost and risk, and consultants who need precise technical direction. Keeping all three aligned around one coherent design intent is the core discipline behind this project.

A project competing against many international design institutions, then moving into delivery for one of the largest stadiums in Asia, places real weight on how well different groups understand and trust the design. The competition jury needed a clear, memorable story. The client needed confidence that an ambitious design could be built on cost and on programme. Consultants needed precise, buildable direction rather than only a compelling image.

Within the project director team, my focus was on concept design and storytelling alongside the technical workstreams, working with the client and multidisciplinary consultants on the friendly urban space interface, the open public realm and the balance between cost and construction period that ultimately helped this design get built rather than remain a competition entry. Detailed design and material selection for the roof and curtain wall continued this same coordination into the project's most technically demanding systems.

This is the part of the project that connects most directly to public sector advisory and service work. Bringing a jury, a client and a delivery team to a shared understanding of the same design, and keeping that understanding intact as the project moves through cost reviews, technical revisions and construction sequencing, is a stakeholder alignment problem as much as an architectural one.