Building a World Cup Stadium in the Amazon

World Cup Stadium in the Amazon: Despite delays, cost increases and design changes, construction of Arena Amazonia in Manaus,
MANAUS, Brazil — The most challenging aspect of building a World Cup soccer stadium in the middle of the Amazon is debatable. Some might say it is figuring out how to get oversize cranes and hundreds of tons of stainless steel and concrete into a city surrounded by a rain forest that stretches for about 2.1 million square miles. Others might mention the need to put most of those materials together before the rainy season floods the entire construction site. Then, of course, there are those who might point to the need to install the special chairs.

Yes, the chairs. It may seem like a small concern — at least compared with the whole everything-being-flooded possibility — but one of the less obvious issues that comes with building a stadium in the jungle is what the searing equatorial sunlight here can do to plastic.

The seats are supposed to be varying shades of yellow and orange. “But if we don’t use the right kind of material,” said Miguel Capobiango Neto, the coordinator of the construction project, “then the sun will melt the paint away. The seats will just turn white.”

Neto sighed. “The Brazilian press compares us a lot to other stadium constructions,” he said through an interpreter. “There is no comparison. There is nothing like this.”

The World Cup has never staged games in a rain forest, much less in the middle of the Amazon. But that is the plan for next summer, an ambition that invites plenty of hurdles. What other major stadium project had to drain an “unwelcome tributary of the French River,” as Neto put it, that ran through its foundation? What other builder has to spend multiple days on each joint that is soldered because the stifling humidity can cause steel to buckle? What other job has to accommodate one of the most ecologically sensitive regions in the world?

Then, of course, there are the concerns about how many more millions will be spent on cost overruns, not to mention what will happen to the stadium once the four World Cup games scheduled to be played here next year are completed. (One recent proposal suggested that the stadium could be converted to a prison.)

Eric Gamboa, an official with the local organizing committee, said the best comparison for the construction of the Arena Amazonia may be to that of the opera house that opened here in 1896.

That construction took place over about 15 years and was financed by the government during a time of booming growth in the rubber industry. The finished product, the Teatro Amazonas, is a gorgeous Renaissance design that, in many ways, looks out of place in its location not far from the city’s more rugged port area.

The stadium project has a similar opulence, and it, too, relies on imported supplies because of a distinct lack of truck-accessible roads to Manaus. Most materials for the stadium have been sent from the port of Aveiro, in Portugal. Three ships were filled with steel and a fourth brought the membrane, or sheath, that serves as the stadium’s partial roof. Each of the ships needed roughly 17 to 20 days to cross the Atlantic Ocean, then navigate the Amazon River and its tributaries to arrive in Manaus.

Given that reality, a concrete prefabrication facility was built next to the stadium site in an attempt to speed construction. Despite having as many as 1,400 employees, the project has been bogged down by the delays, cost increases and design changes that come with seemingly every significant piece of Brazilian infrastructure. In a polite but pointed statement, Hubert Nienhoff, the chief executive of gmp-Architekten, the German firm that designed the stadium, said that although the “precise planning and implementation that Germans are credited with” might be respected in Brazil, they are “not always compatible with the existing pragmatic day-to-day business” in the country.

His point was unmistakable. Left unsaid was this: The progress in Manaus was so sluggish that at one point late last year, Jérôme Valcke, the secretary general of soccer’s governing body, FIFA, said it was possible that games would not be played in the city if the stadium’s deadlines were not met.

That threat, according to local officials, prompted a construction surge, and with it a ballooning budget. The stadium was supposed to cost about 500 million reais (about $227 million) and be completed by July; now it will cost at least 600 million reais and is scheduled to be finished by December, Neto said. As of the end of August, about 78 percent of the stadium was complete, according to FIFA, making the target date at least theoretically feasible.

“The rainy season starts at the end of November,” Neto said. “Because of that, we must really rush to have the ceiling ready by then.”