Polish stadium's foundations take shape

The piling contract for Poland's new national stadium in Warsaw, being built for the 2012 European football championships, has been completed ahead of schedule.

Danish contractor Per Aarsleff and its European subsidiaries carried out the work in preparation for construction of the stadium, which is estimated to cost between PLN 1.5 billion (€ 335 million) to PLN 2.2 billion (€ 490 million) and is due for completion in 2011.

Per Aarsleff's Polish subsidiary, Aarsleff, supplied and installed 9000 large section, heavily reinforced precast concrete piles over five months. The piles will provide the bulk of foundations for the 55000-seat stadium's multilevel terraced seating and main support stanchions for the roof, with its retractable inner membrane over the playing surface.

Aarsleff began work at the site in October last year and at peak production assembled a fleet of nine heavy-duty rigs including two Banut 850s, a Hitachi KH125 and KH180, three Junttan PM20s and two Junttan PM25s, all fitted with 7 to 9 tonne hammers.

Managing director for Aarsleff, Przemyslaw Nowak said, "We are the largest precast concrete pile manufacturer and contractor in Poland and could have completed this prestigious contract without the support of the other subsidiaries.

"However, this would have been to the detriment of our other clients in Poland while we were engaged in this huge contract for the national stadium. So we decided to allocate some of our rigs to our other smaller domestic projects and supplement the stadium contract with larger rigs, operators and piles from the parent company and other subsidiaries. We were able to mobilise very quickly and the combination of resources, rapidly pooled together with our established core operation and organisation in Poland, was the key to our success here."

The stadium, designed by JSK Architekci Sp. based in Warsaw, in conjunction with Germany-based gmp-Architekten von Gerkan, Marg und Partner and civil and structural consulting engineer Schlaich Bergermann und Partner, is being built directly in the basin of the existing tenth Anniversary Stadium.

There will be nine levels in the new arena, including a five level concourse under the terraced seating for offices, conference facilities and restaurants, a further two lower levels for players' changing rooms and the press and two levels directly under the pitch's playing surface for underground parking for about 1700 cars.

Per Aarsleff foundation works group manager, Lars Rande, said, "For the stadium project we needed the group's bigger rigs with the heavier hammers to cope with the heavy and big section piles. In addition to the big Polish rigs we brought in two each from Germany, UK and Denmark, plus operators. We also combined and used our joint pile manufacturing capacity from our KPB pile factory in Poland and Centrum Pæle in Denmark."