U Arena celebrates official opening in spectacular style with Rolling Stones’ concert

The brand new 32,000-seat U Arena, home to Racing 92 rugby, and which is now one of the biggest indoor capacities in Europe, has officially opened its doors, marking its inauguration with a spectacular concert by world-renowned rockers, The Rolling Stones.

U Arena offers an optimised space for the biggest international shows in a unique atmosphere. It has been designed to revolutionise the sports and entertainment experience, with its ultra-modern infrastructure and entertainment systems offering a platform designed to multiply and magnify the emotions that will be lived by the arena’s spectators and fans.

Located in the heart of Paris’ La Défense business district, U Arena is the largest and most innovative performance venue ever built in Europe. Designed by architect Christian de Portzamparc, the arena offers a multi-functional, modular space with a capacity that can be optimised to welcome anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 spectators.

The space can be reconfigured to serve live concerts, corporate and special events, as well as a host of local and international sporting events, including those of its resident rugby club, Racing 92.

This exceptional platform, which has already been announced as an official venue for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, was inaugurated last week, October 19, by rock legends, The Rolling Stones.

U Arena’s artificial pitch, by Tarkett Sports (previously Desso GrassMaster), will be protected by Terraplas’ world-leading terratrak-plus turf protection system, which sports a bespoke silver/grey top. The Terraplas product was chosen after months’ of testing of all the systems currently available on the market and was deemed to be the most superior, meeting the exacting demands of U Arena.

Racing 92 will take to the field for their first game on December 23, when they will meet Toulouse in a Top 14 fixture.

Moment Factory, which acquired the Parisian studio of All Access Design, is the resident experiential partner for U Arena, having designed a unified experiential multimedia system capable of activating all the surfaces and volumes of U Arena — the largest and most versatile performance venue ever constructed in Europe.

Matei Georgescu Paquin, Paris Office Director / Managing Producer, Moment Factory, said:

To breathe life into this scalable space, our studio designed a tailor-made technological infrastructure with a unified experiential multimedia content management system. This unified system enables our team to control, synchronise and drive content across all of U Arena’s multimedia platforms, ensuring a coherent, seamless, immersive experience. At the heart of the venue is a dynamic projection system that is exceptional as much for the dimensions of the surfaces it can cover as for its multiple potential configurations. Projected content can be reconfigured—even in real-time during a single event—to allow high-impact visuals to be mapped onto the field, onto a variety of vertical surfaces and even onto the crowds.

 

This technological installation will be able to support thousands of simultaneous high-speed Wi-Fi connections, expanding the potential for interactivity and public participation during events. Taken together, these technologies will offer spectators a wholly immersive multimedia experience.

 

Moment Factory is proud of its role as the U Arena’s resident experiential partner and to have endowed the U Arena with one of the boldest and most versatile experiential content platforms in the world!

Main image (top): Copyright © Atelier Christian de Portzamparc

You can also find out more about Tarkett Sports systems by reading the interview with Amsterdam Arena’s Henk van Raan and FieldTurf’s Arjan Knotterus, following the installation of a new PlayMaster system this summer, online at: http://sportsvenuebusiness.com/index.php/2017/09/11/world-class-interview-amsterdam-arenas-henk-van-raan/

You can hear more about Terraplas, including details on their latest developments and key clients, by checking out their SVB Directory listing online at: http://sportsvenuebusiness.com/index.php/2017/06/21/terraplas/

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