The Atlanta Falcons will play their home opener against the Green Bay Packers this Sunday, 9/17. As exciting as that is on a normal year, this year will be that much more special as it will also mark the opening of their brand new $1.4 billion stadium, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
The highlight of the new stadium is the pinwheel retractable roof, which opens in 8 minutes and looks like the opening scene of a James Bond movie. There were some scares that it would not be ready for the first game of the season, but Falcons’ officials have stated that the roof could open, weather permitting. An open roof would mark the first time the Falcons have played in an open air stadium at home since 1991, the last year they played in the Fulton County Stadium before moving to the Georgia Dome. The new stadium will not only host the Falcons, but will also host the Atlanta United of the MLS, the 2018 College Football National Championship, the 2019 Super Bowl and the 2020 NCAA Men’s Final Four.
Other than the retractable roof, some of the key features of the Mercedes-Benz are:
- A flexible capacity, which can hold up to 75,000 people for a football game or World Cup soccer match and up to 83,000 for a NCAA basketball game.
- A floor to ceiling window on the northeast corner with a view to downtown Atlanta
- A 360 degree HD video halo board which wraps around the top of the entire stadium. It will be 58 feet tall and span a total of 1100 linear feet in diameter, making it the largest video board in the world.
The construction was carried out by a joint venture called HHRM JV, which is made up of team members from Hunt Construction Group, Holder Construction, H.J. Russell & Co., and C.D. Moody Construction Co.
EarthCam was on site to document the progress for 39 months, from June 2014 to September of this year.
As you may already know, the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks officially opened their new home, the Fiserv Forum, for the 2018-2019 NBA season last October. That new stadium is being heralded as the “World’s First Bird Friendly Arena,” due to many of the design features. Well, since the new one is open, we can only expect that the old, non-bird friendly (I’m assuming) arena has overstayed its welcome and has to go.
Two and a half years ago, I came across one of the most interesting construction projects I’ve ever seen, called The Guedelon Castle. In a world with cordless power tools, smartphones, and tables strewn across the jobsite, the Guedlon Castle is being constructed solely from 13th Century building techniques in Burgundy, France.
The Smithsonian channel is airing a series of shows titled America in Color, in which they enhance lost or forgotten video footage of the 1900s, beginning with the 1920s. Part of the first episode in the series shows the men that worked on skyscrapers in New York City and it’s been edited to show color, as opposed to black and white, for the first time.
Everyone has a camera in their pocket these days and when something goes down on the jobsite, you can bet it’s going to be captured on video one way or another. That can either be a great thing for marketing or an awful way to showcase your business.
2018 was a noticeably slow year in the world of demolition videos , but it’s not exactly clear what caused that. Even though the quantity of videos was down last year, we have scoured the earth for some extremely high quality and fun-to-watch demolitions.
Look, you could mobilize on site the boring old way by loading your heavy equipment on the bed of a trailer and driving it to site, or you could take a note from the Bravo Company of the 37th Engineer Battalion of the United States and spice things up a bit.
A couple of years ago, we shared a video of Fastbrick Robotic’s Hadrian 105, a brick-laying robot built for proof of concept. In a true testament of how long the development of computer-model based commercial robotics takes to develop, the company’s commercial robot model, the Hadrian X, has finally reached a goal that has been sought after since 2015: Building a 3-bedroom, 2-bath home in 3 days.