Ecca collection

Oleg Kharchenko, chief architect at SC Olympstroy, the state corporation for construction of Sochi’s Olympic venues, described the Sochi Olympic Park as ‘an architectural ensemble incorporating a diverse array of façades, colours and textures’. It was designed, he added, with the intention of creating a distinctive and impressive image for the Games.

Tata Steel subsidiary and manufacturer of tailored metal building envelopes Kalzip has made a significant contribution to this image, as it was involved in the complex designs of two of the six stadiums: namely the Bolshoy Ice Dome, home to the Games' main ice hockey matches; and the similarly curvilinear yet distinctly ice crystal inspired Adler Skating Arena.

These impressive structures sit within the Olympic Park, on the Imeretinskaya lowland, surrounded on one side by the magnificent Caucasus Mountains and on the other by the Black Sea. 

The Adler Arena Skating Center (now the Adler Arena Trade and Exhibition Center) opened in 2012 as an 8,000-seat speed-skating oval. In plan though, this cool grey and white building is essentially a rectangle with rounded corners. Angled walls and triangular sections of glazing reinforce the building’s intentionally crystalline surface appearance.

The $32.8m building was designed by the Russian company Kuban Universal Project and the international architectural and engineering firm Cannon Design, responsible for the Richmond Oval for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, designed its clean-lined interior, which housed two competition lanes as well as a training area.

The defining feature of this impressively sleek and beautiful edifice though has to be its ice crystal-inspired exterior surface, a surface effect provided by Kalzip 65 perforated and tapered Reynolux aluminium sheets from Alcoa Architectural Products. The underside was made using a similarly perforated Kalzip FC façade panels in RAL 7035. From the inside, says Kalzip, this gives spectators an unobstructed view of the Olympic Park. Some 11,000 square metres of Kalzip profiled Reynolux Aluminium sheets were used in the construction of the Adler Arena. The entrance is remarkably shaped in arcade using Kalzip Reynobond^® aluminium panels by Alcoa Architectural Products. The bendability of the panels allows to achieve this kind of curved shapes arcade.

All sheets were manufactured on-site using what Kalzip describes as ‘state-of-the-art’ mobile roll-forming technology. ‘The timely delivery of these complex and demanding construction projects in challenging conditions is testament to the commitment of our dedicated and highly experienced team,’ says Kalzip EU managing director Jörg Schwall.