Engineering the arena [Engineering Football]

After landing football's premier tournament, the 2010 FIFA World cup, South Africa realised that hosting the first African World Cup meant overcoming a raft of technical challenges. When the planning started, one of the imperatives for the design of the stadium was to make it as environmentally friendly as possible. Of course, energy and water saving are the two most important factors there. So the design, the orientation, some of the materials that have been chosen, the technologies that have gone into the stadium, even something relatively simple, like rainwater harvesting, all had to be planned right from the early stages of conceptual design.