A sensitive upgrade and extension of a suburban football club, to serve as a training ground for the FIFA 2023 Women’s World Cup. The collaborative process with FIFA, the Birkenhead United Association Football Club and the local community has delivered a world-class facility for a global tournament and future generations of local players.
I've been involved in the club for over a decade, so I put my hand up to facilitate the process of FIFA assessment. We established early on that the most effective and realistic use of the money to build new changing rooms attached to the existing clubrooms.
There's two parts to this project. We were designing a training facility for the Women's World Cup, but there was a legacy aspect to this build as well. The building lives on for the club and for football in Auckland. We had a compressed timeline, so there was a lot of trust involved and we worked in a very focused and collaborative way with the club community, FIFA, Auckland Council and other partners.