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The World's Top 10 Largest Domes

By Scott Lewis

1. Singapore National Stadium, 310-meter span, completed 2014. The world’s largest self-supporting dome. Designed by Arup Associates, the National Stadium accommodates 55,000 spectators for soccer or rugby, 52,000 for cricket and 50,000 for track and field meets. Dragages Singapore Ptd. Ltd., the general contractor, began construction in 2010, and completed piling and foundation work by September, 2011.

*Photo: Darren Soh*

2. AT&T Stadium, 275 meters, Arlington, Texas, USA, completed 2009. Home to the Dallas Cowboys team of the National Football League, and formerly called Cowboys Stadium, the venue seats 80,000, expandable to 105,000 with standing room. It was designed by the HKS Sports & Entertainment Group. Two 1,225-ft-long fixed transverse box trusses cross the opening of the 410-ft x 256-ft sunroof. Each 35-ft-deep, 17-ft-wide truss box arch weighs 3,250 tons. Each arch, rising to a height of 292 ft, springs from a 3,400-cu-yd reinforced-concrete thrust-block abutment. Derr Steel Erection Co. devoted 18 months to the steel erection work. The two roof panels, each 286 ft x 220 ft, are pulled uphill by a first-of-its-kind rack-and-pinion gear-drive system, designed by structural engineer Walter P Moore. Uni-Systems LLC was the roof panel transporter-supplier. “The retractable panels on that roof go up 23.9°, the steepest slope of any retractable stadium roof,” says Uni-Systems president Bart Riberich. The stadium cost $1.1 billion to build. It hosted a crowd of 108,713 spectators for the 2010 National Basketball Association All-Star Game, the highest-attended basketball game in history. It has been the site of numerous college football games, boxing matches, and concerts by Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and the Rolling Stones.

*Photo: Nicole Cordeiro/Wikimedia Commons*

3. Oita Bank Dome, 274 meters, Oita, Japan, completed 2001. Home to Japanese League soccer club Oita Trinita, the stadium seats 40,000. It was designed by architect Kisho Kurokawa. Its retractable roof system, with weather-resistant Teflon panels, is driven by a wire traction system. The roof’s titanium-sheathed stationary portion is said to resemble a flying saucer. The general contractor was the KT Group, a unit of Takenaka Corp. The construction cost was 25 billion yen. Nicknamed “Big Eye,” it hosted three World Cup soccer matches in 2002.

*Photo: Wikimedia Commons*

4. Millennium Stadium, 272 meters x 332 meters, Cardiff, Wales, UK, completed 1999. Recently renamed the Principality Stadium, it is home to the Wales national rugby team. It was designed by Bligh Lobb Sports Architecture, a firm that is now part of Populous, and W.S. Atkins served as the structural engineers. The general contractor was Laing. The roof components were fabricated and erected by Cimolai S.p.A. It has a seating capacity of 74,500. The construction cost was 121 million pounds. It has hosted auto races, and concerts by Bon Jovi, U2, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones.

*Photo: Patrick Bingham Hall*

5. Sapporo Dome, 245 meters, Sapporo, Japan, completed 2001. It is the home field for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team and the Consadole Sapporo association football (soccer) team. It was designed by architect Hiroshi Hara, and Lend Lease served as the construction manager. It accommodates 41,484 spectators for soccer and 40,476 for baseball. It hosted three World Cup matches in 2002. A distinctive feature of the stadium is its two playing surfaces. Baseball games are played on artificial turf, while soccer matches are held on grass. To transition from baseball to football, a set of lower bowl bleachers rotate, and two sections of main bowl seats then retract, and the soccer field, a giant tray is slid into the stadium and the lower bowl then rotates 90 degrees into position. The movable stage holding the grass field is 85 m x 120 m and weighs 8,750 tons. The conversion procedure takes a total of five hours. It is the planned venue for the opening and closing ceremonies for the Asian Winter Games in 2017, as well as some of the soccer matches during the Summer Olympics in 2020.

*Photo: Wikimedia Commons*

6. Nantong Sports Centre, 240 meters, Nantong, China, completed 2006. It was the first stadium with a retractable roof in China. Seating capacity is 32,244. The roof was fabricated and installed by Jinggong Steel Building Group. The two movable roof panels, each weighing 1,100 tons, are moved into position by a hydraulic propulsion system designed by Enerpac, with eight winches (four per shell). The cable drum of each winch is driven by six hydrometers and gear-reduction gearboxes. The hemispherical shells are supported by 44 trolleys.

*Photo: Wikimedia Commons*

7. Seibu Dome, 220 meters, Saitama, Japan, completed 1999. It is the home field of the Saitama Seibu Lions baseball team. The stadium, which was built in 1979 without a roof, was designed by by Yoshiro Ikehara. The roof was added in 1999 and constructed by Kajima Construction Corp. Ltd. It covers the playing field and seating bowl but is mounted on columns thereby permitting air to circulate, so it is possible for home run balls to leave the stadium. This unusual roof design presented the builders with a challenge. Normally, large clear-span roofs are erected using numerous pillars. But that was not possible for Seibu Dome, because the spectator stands could not bear the weight of the pillars. Kajima’s team overcame the challenge by gradually erecting the concentric steel rings comprising the roof progressively towards the center. Retrofitting the stadium with the roof had to be executed during the baseball team’s four months-long offseason, over two separate years. After the roof’s steel frame was completed and covered with steel panels, the 145-meter-diameter membrane roof section was assembled on the ground, raised and joined to the frame. It seats 33,921. Both the baseball team and the stadium are owned by Seibu Railway and it is located adjacent to the terminal railway station of the Seibu Sayama Line in a Tokyo suburb.

*Photo: Wikimedia Commons*

8. Fukuoka Dome, 212 meters, Fukuoka, Japan, completed 1993. This was the first stadium with a retractable roof in Japan and is home to the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks baseball team. The roof comprises of three fan-shaped, steel-framed panels sheathed in 3-mm thick titanium. One panel is in a fixed position, and the other two rotate into position, supported by 24-bogie wheel assemblies. The two movable panels weigh 4,000 and 4,200 tons. It cost 76 billion yen to construct. The design-build team consisted of the Takenaka Corp. and Maeda Corp. In recent years its formal name has been Fukuoka Yahuoku! Dome, as Yahoo! Japan, a SoftBank subsidiary, acquired the naming rights. It has hosted concerts by Frank Sinatra, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Bon Jovi and Michael Jackson.

*Photo: Wikimedia Commons*

9. Tropical Islands Resort, 210 meters x 360 meters, Krausnick, Germany, completed 2000. This structure, located 60 km south of Berlin, was originally designed to serve as an airship hangar, but the firm developing the airship, CargoLifter, went bankrupt in 2002. The hangar was designed by SIAT Bauplanung ind Ingenieurleistungen GmbH & Co. OHG, a subsidiary of Siemens, and Arup served as the structural engineer. The construction cost was 78 million euros. Its footprint is 66,000 sq meters (16.3 acres), equivalent to eight football fields. The dome is 107 m tall. After CargoLifter’s bankruptcy, the structure was bought by Tanjong, a Malaysian company, and converted into the tropical theme park, which opened in 2004. Inside the dome the air temperature is maintained at 26°C, and humidity is about 64%. To allow the tropical plants to grow, a 20,000-sq-m section of the dome’s south-facing side was faced with ETFE, which allows light and ultraviolet rays to penetrate the dome. The resort includes a 4,400-square-meter pool called Tropical Sea designed to resemble the waters of a coral island, with a 200-m-long sandy beach. It also includes 1,200-sq-m pool called The Bali Lagoon that features fountains, whirlpools and two water slides. There is an extensive rainforest section with 50,000 plants, and a tropical village featuring copies of traditional buildings from Thailand, Borneo, Samoa and Bali. Guests can overnight in hotel-like rooms, lodges, or camping tents pitched on the sand. A 4,000-sq-m children’s play area and a sauna and spa facility round out the complex.

*Photo: Wikimedia Commons*

10. Rogers Centre, 208 meters, Toronto, completed 1989. It was designed by architect Rob Robbie and structural engineer Michael Allen. It was constructed by EllisDon Construction and the Dominion Bridge Co., both Canadian firms. The construction cost was $570 million in Canadian dollars. It is home to the Toronto Blue Jays major league baseball team, and seats 49,282 spectators for baseball games. It was originally named the SkyDome, but was renamed the Rogers Centre after Rogers Communications bought the Blue Jays in 2005. It was the first stadium to have a retractable roof. One unusual feature is that it has a hotel attached to it, and 70 of the hotel rooms overlook the playing field. The roof consists of four panels; one is fixed in position, while the other three slide into position on rails. Opening or closing the roof takes 20 minutes. The stadium was home to the National Basketball Association’s Toronto Raptors team from 1995-99. It hosted several NFL Buffalo Bills games in 2008. Concert performers have included the Rolling Stones, Madonna, U2 and Bruce Springsteen.

*Photo: Wikimedia Commons*

Before modern builders created the world's largest domes, ancient societies built domed structures in Mesopotamia, China, Persia, Greece and Rome.

One of the most famous domes from antiquity is the Pantheon, completed in 126 AD by Roman emperor Hadrian. It served as a Roman temple and, later, as a Catholic church. With a diameter of 43.3 meters, it is the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. A notable feature of the Pantheon is its coffered ceiling: The recessed panels serve to lighten its weight, a key factor in its durability.

Byzantine emperor Justinian oversaw the construction of Hagia Sophia, completed in 537, which was the world’s largest cathedral until 1520. Considered a jewel of Byzantine architecture, its ribbed dome rests on pendentives (triangular segments of a sphere), which taper to form columns that transport the weight of the dome to the piers beneath. Following the fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) to the Turks in 1453, it served as a mosque.

Among the masterpieces of Renaissance architecture is the Duomo, the cathedral of Florence. Its dome was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, who is considered to be the first modern engineer. He faced the challenge of designing a masonry dome without relying on Gothic buttresses, which were anathema to the Florentine architects. Brunelleschi’s solution entailed a set of four horizontal stone and iron chains, serving as hoops. It was completed in 1436.

Vatican City has another notable domed structure, St. Peter’s Basilica, which dominates the Rome skyline. Construction of St. Peter’s lasted for more than a century, reaching completion in 1626. Michelangelo is generally credited with choosing the dome’s ovoid shape, in contrast with the Pantheon and Duomo domes, which were hemispheres. Made up of 16 stone ribs and inner and outer brick shells, St. Peter's has an interior diameter of 41.47 meters.

Erected in 1866, the U.S. Capitol dome is another iconic structure. Made of cast iron, the dome is painted to resemble the marble building it tops off. Thomas U. Walter is responsible for its neoclassical design. Suffering from more than 1,000 cracks and extensive corrosion, the dome has been undergoing a restoration since 2014. With a Turner Construction-Smoot Construction joint venture leading the building team, the project is scheduled to be completed by January 2017, in time for the upcoming presidential inauguration.

The 10 domed structures in the above slide show have either fixed or retractable roofs—three are fixed and seven are retractable. Please note that this survey does not include fabric-covered roofs. However, both round and elliptical structures were eligible for inclusion—eight are round and two are elliptical.

Domed Sports Facilities

While domes always have crowned religious edifices and major government buildings, in recent decades they have played a growing role in sheltering spectators. Although the Roman Colosseum had a system of awnings, operated by ropes and pulleys, an increasing number of modern stadiums are designed with fixed or retractable dome roofs, thus offering spectators protection from rain and excessive heat.

With roofed stadiums, “event planning is not weather-dependent,” says Bart Riberich, president and owner of Uni-Systems, a kinetic architecture supplier to many large stadium projects.

The Houston Astrodome, which opened in 1965, was the first indoor ballpark constructed for a Major League Baseball team. Its 195-meter (642-ft) clear span was designed by two firms, Lloyd & Morgan and Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson, and built by contractor H.A. Lott Inc. It was the first domed sports stadium in the world to have more than 20,000 seats.

The Mercedes-Benz Superdome, erected in 1975 and home to the National Football League's New Orleans Saints, was the largest domed structure at the time it was built. Its 207-m-dia (678-ft) span is a Lamella roof. Design of the roof was subcontracted to Roof Structures Inc., the patent-holders of the Lamella system, which consists of a repetitious diamond pattern that is formed by one structural-steel member framing two others and so on. The superdome's configuration consists of welded and bolted skewed trusses 7.3 ft deep. The roof, with a surface area of nine acres, is supported at its perimeter by a 9-ft-thick tension ring. U.S. Steel Corp.'s American Bridge Division used 37 tower cranes placed in concentric circles to erect the dome.

Although the Mercedes-Benz Superdome has a 76,468-person seating capacity for football—the most for a fixed-roof stadium—two Japanese baseball parks, Sapporo Dome and Seibu Dome, have larger-diameter fixed roofs.

The first stadium with a fully retractable roof was the Toronto SkyDome, home of Major League Baseball's Blue Jays. Since it opened in 1989, it has been renamed the Rogers Centre. (For more details, see the accompanying slide show above.)

The first Major League Baseball stadium in the U.S. with a retractable roof was Phoenix's Chase Field (originally named Bank One Ballpark), which opened in 1998 as the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. It was also the first retractable-roof stadium with a natural-grass playing field.

“Its retractable-roof design is based on gantry-crane technology that’s been around forever,” says Bill Johnson, senior vice president and design principal in HOK's Kansas City, Mo., office. It was built by a joint venture of Perini and McCarthy. Since Phoenix boasts the highest temperatures of any major city in the U.S., a roofed and air-conditioned facility was crucial for both players and spectators. Six Major League Baseball parks currently have retractable roofs.

A number of leaps in retractable-roof-system design have occurred in the past two decades. When it opened in 2000, Houston’s Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field), home to the Houston Astros baseball team, exhibited a notably innovative traveling-roof assembly. It features three structurally independent movable panels, spanning up to 580 ft, that ride on transporter assemblies. The mechanism distributes roof loads through the independent wheel assemblies, rather than bogies.The design was the fruit of close collaboration between HOK, structural engineer Walter P Moore, travel mechanism consultant Uni-Systems and steel erector Robert W. Derr.

NRG Stadium (formerly Reliant Stadium), opened in 2002 and home to the NFL's Houston Texans, has a 956-ft x 385-ft roof that depends on a traveling mechanism that rides on rails along the tops of exposed structural-steel supertrusses. When extended, the two trussed panels meet over the 50-yard line; when retracting, they part like the Red Sea, each one moving toward an end zone.

When it opened in 2008, Lucas Oil Stadium, home to the Indianapolis Colts football team, inspired a new direction in roof-panel movement, thanks to its gabled roof. The panels separate along the roof’s longitudinal ridge and roll away from each other down the straight, 13.2° pitch. They land along the sides of the building. In most other retractable-roof football stadiums in the U.S., panels part along the 50-yard line and roll toward the end zones.

Opening in 2009, AT&T Stadium, home of the NFL's Dallas Cowboys, set several records, one of which was the steepest slope, at 23.9°. That factor inspired the designers to come up with a first-of-a-kind rack-and-pinion gear-drive system for moving the retractable panels (for more details, see accompanying slide show).

Currently under construction in Atlanta, the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium is expected to open in 2017 and will be home to the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons.

“Arthur Blank, the Falcons owner, wanted something modern, fresh and iconic,” says HOK’s Johnson, the designer. “Iconic adds enormous value—like nothing you’ve seen before. So, we thought, 'Let’s try to do a unique geometry for the roof, which would then inform the rest of the building.’ We came up with a pinwheel-shaped retractable roof. The idea was to do smaller roof sections, lighter weight, moving smaller distances. All eight roof segments move in a straight line—a little bit of a mind trick. Nothing is really rotating. That geometry informed the bigger roof structure and that informed the structure beneath.”

Other Famous Domes

In contrast to sports stadiums, leaders of Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ), Philippines, asked Populous to design them a large, enclosed facility for church gatherings. The resulting Philippine Arena presented the firm with certain challenges.

“There were really two main differences between designing a sports stadium and the Philippine Arena,” notes Andrew James, senior principal with Populous, based in Brisbane. "First, the 'field of play' was different. The arena is designed around a podium/speaker’s platform, and the sight lines for the seating bowl are focused around this.

“Sports played inside an arena tend to take place on a centrally located field of play, so the seating bowl goes all the way around the arena. With the Philippine Arena, the stage is at one side, so we designed a single-sided seating bowl, like an enormous theater. The second major difference was the acoustics. Acoustic qualities for a plenary hall, or speaking hall, have a much higher requirement than sport does. But high-quality acoustics were a necessary requirement for the Philippine Arena because the building also functions as a church. The spoken word is probably the most difficult acoustics challenge for architects and engineers,” James explains.

The arena, which opened in 2014 and seats 50,000, is elliptical in shape, with its roof measuring 190 m by 246 m.

Another challenge was Manila’s climate. "Obviously, the air-conditioning system had to be large enough to effectively cool an area the size of a 50,000-seat arena,” says James. "We tried also to limit the volume of the space. It’s a [reasonably] flat space if you look at it in sections, which meant we worked hard to air-condition only what was really necessary. We also had to ensure access and egress was properly controlled so that there wasn’t a lot of cool air escaping.”

Another major commission that Populous is undertaking is the Taipei Dome, sited in downtown Taipei, a mixed-use complex combining a 40,000-seat baseball arena, as well as 200,000 sq m of retail, office, apartments and hotel space.

“The Taipei Dome is so large that we really did design the building’s form, volume and shape to fit the requirements of the space inside,” says James. "This process is slightly different on the Taipei Dome, as it has a central-city location and is very large. We designed it so that the mass of the building was minimized as much as possible. We sunk the field of play 15 meters below street level. Instead of being a pure dome or spherical shape, the roof is flattened on top almost like a computer mouse. Again, that was to reduce the overall bulk of the building.”

Elliptically shaped, it will measure 170 m by 237 m. Construction has progressed halfway but is currently on hold.

The market seems bright for future enclosed stadiums and arenas.

"We are finding that arenas are very popular in Asia,” says James. "The music-and-entertainment industry is much bigger in Asia than sport, with the exception of soccer in China. These activities generally require indoor spaces for high-quality performances in terms of acoustics and weather. Arena design suits these need perfectly."

Scott Lewis is Associate Editor of ENR

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