Truist Park
Shaping a new era in engineering and design modeling
Project Facts
Location | Atlanta, Georgia |
Owner | Cobb-Marietta Coliseum and Exhibit Hall Authority |
Size | 1,200,000 SF |
Cost | $475 million |
Status | Completed 2017 |
Certifications | LEED Silver |
Overview
The Atlanta Braves’ ballpark stands as a remarkable centerpiece at the heart of The Battery Atlanta, a sprawling 60-acre mixed-use development featuring apartments, offices, and restaurants. Walter P Moore’s team engineered an innovative modeling approach that ensured seamless alignment between the stadium’s seats and its steel structure, setting new standards for precision and functionality.
Services
About the Project
Home to the Atlanta Braves, Truist Park (formerly SunTrust Park) anchors The Battery Atlanta mixed-use development. This modern stadium features a three-tier grandstand that wraps from the right field foul pole around home plate to the left field foul pole, encompassing much of the field. It includes 4,000 premium seats across several distinctive club spaces. The split top deck design keeps fans connected to the action, offering views of the field even from the concourse.
The stadium features the largest canopy in Major League Baseball. The large sunscreen above the upper deck enhances spectator comfort by providing significant shading during a hot summer game day. Using state-of-the-art parametric modeling techniques, Walter P Moore created an optimization routine that simultaneously evaluated hundreds of shapes and sizes for the canopy and then correlated the resulting structural quantities and costs to the amount of shaded seating in the bowl in real time. This highly sophisticated analysis helped guide the final form of the architecture.
In addition, our team created a mathematical model to define the entire precast seating bowl and supporting steel structure by identifying the parameters that determine the relationship between the two systems. This level of precision and detailed coordination, which typically occurs during the construction phase, instead happened during the early design phase, and was updated in real-time in our design and documentation models as the design progressed. This allowed the design team to not only adapt quickly to changes in bowl geometry but also to ensure precise locations of the structural steel at every location so the model could be used reliably by downstream parties.