Wukesong Arena was built in west Beijing for the 2008 Olympics specifically to host basketball. Privately financed by developer Bloomage International Investment Group Inc, the venue was managed by AEG and then closed post games for a total refurbishment.
The refurbishment maintains the basketball heritage, with regular appearances by the American NBA teams - basketball having a huge following in China. However, it now works as a major world class concert venue, the first in a planned series of 11 across China, all managed by AEG.
The venue's roof, covering some 14,400 m2, was designed for sports use rather than concert rigging and so the owners went to tender for suitable solutions for rigging. Bidding against worldwide competition, Star Events Group's Active Roof Technology (ART of Rigging) system was jointly selected by Bloomage and AEG. The rigging system had to solve the multiple problems of creating a wide span mother grid (roof nodes at 12m centres) for concert use, keeping the mother grid out of sight lines for basket ball and finding a solution to the 20 ton centre-hung scoreboard that created a huge number of seat kills for concert use.
The mother grid was based on a new version of SEGL's VerTech mega-truss that offers loading capacities of up to 10.2 tons on a 12m span. Built from thin wall hi-tensile steel, this truss is considerably lighter than an aluminium equivalent.
All roof nodes were equipped with 4our-ton Loadguard hoists, fitted with dual phase encoders, networked load cells, temperature sensors and hour meters.
Control is based around Ibex Programmable Hoist Control and Load Cell Monitor units linked by a PC running Hoist-Net software to Guardian hoist controllers. Hoists and control were all supplied on a 'plug and play' basis by Lift Turn Move in the UK.
Installation was headed up by Roger Barrett as project director and Jo Xie (general manager of Star Events Group China) as project manager. Three of SEGL's UK crew (Pete English, Oz Wickham and Andrew Phillips) worked with SEGL's Chinese crew and six crew from the fabricators.
Installation of the mother grid and re-build of the scoreboard was achieved in 14 days with a further three days of commissioning and training.
First events in the venue include an NBA game between the Denver Nuggets and the Indiana Pacers, a major concert featuring local artists for China Central TV and then Beyonce.
(Jim Evans)
