Inflatable structure serves as portable venue for football tournament

Tectoniks Ltd. | Shrewsbury, Shropshire, United Kingdom

The project, which won an Outstanding Achievement Award in the air structures category of the 2008 International Achievement Awards, involved the design and construction of an inflatable structure to serve as a portable venue for the promotion of the Euro 2008 football tournament in Austria and Switzerland. The client could not find venues of sufficient size in each of the 13 cities on the dates required, so they concluded that some form of temporary structure would be required at each location. Given the tight schedule and limited resources for the tour, the structure would have to be erected at each location in just four hours with a small crew. The structure also needed to be visually exciting and reflect the brand identity of the tournament. Conventional portable structures had already been eliminated because they could not be installed in time and could not provide the visual impact required. Tectoniks’ solution was to provide a revolutionary inflatable building, the largest of its kind in the world. The building is made up of two domes that are connected by a sweeping tunnel. The larger of the two domes contains the multimedia cinema; the smaller dome houses the interactive zone.