Featured image credit: Everton FC
Everton’s new Bramley Moore Dock stadium is to be clad by more than half a million bricks, with the first of 731 brick façade panels having already been installed.
In an update for fans, the Premier League club said the use of bricks will complement the industrial dockside surroundings of the under-construction 52,888-capacity stadium.
The first brick façade has been installed in the north west corner of the emerging building, with each panel computer-designed in a 3D environment before being manufactured from real bricks.
The panels will create a contrasting dark red brick pattern, interweaved into the individual panels to provide a visual representation of the Goodison Park latticework, first pioneered by Archibald Leitch.
Mike Young, a principal façade engineer at Laing O’Rourke, said: “This is the first glimpse of how the stadium is going to look aesthetically from the outside and, for me, as a façade engineer looking after all the external look, this is the first significant part of the envelope of the building, so it’s exciting.
“It’s been two years in the making to get to this point and it signifies that 2023 is going to be a very busy year.”
Laing O’Rourke said the decision to incorporate cutting-edge design and manufacture off-site rather than use traditional bricklaying techniques, is one that has many benefits, including quality assurance and safety.
Young said: “If we were doing this in a traditional brickwork build, the whole building would be scaffolded and we would need heavy machinery to move around the bricks and other materials, so doing it this way shrinks the construction programme quite significantly.
“Another thing is that when the brick cladding comes to site, the quality assurance that is done in the factory far exceeds what we can guarantee on site.”
Everton in April appointed Laing O’Rourke as the construction partner that will complete the development of the new stadium, which is scheduled to open in 2024.
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