When the world’s largest spherical screens were to be turned on this Friday, the lights on the facade and inside the newly opened Madison Square Garden in Las Vegas (Nevada, USA) were to be illuminated for the first time with something that few would have imagined . They have a Spanish seal. A concert by the Irish U2 opened this iconic building at night, whose main attraction is a sphere covered with a 54,000 square meter LED screen (15,000 inside) and a resolution of 128,000 square meters, designed in the studio of a young architect in Zaragoza , calculated and projected by Miguel Fontgivel.
The Sphere of Las Vegas is the new leisure space in the city of casinos and its dimensions alone are overwhelming: with a height of 112 meters and a width of 157 meters and a capacity for 18,000 spectators, it is considered the largest spherical building in the world. It cost an investment of 2.5 billion euros and is capable of providing images with one level of brightness thanks to its external screen that covers the facade like a second skin and is equipped with more than 50 million LED lights that are widely visible day and night suitable and a resolution “32 times higher than that of the best high-definition television”.
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Anyone who assumes this can do it. It is the 42-year-old architect from Zaragoza, Miguel Fontgivel, who has led the team in charge, a total of 23 professionals, including 30 at the height of the project, who have combined computers, engineering and architecture, even using artificial intelligence to design and calculate the two screens of the building. “A five-year job, more complex in mathematics than in architecture,” says Fontgivel. “The entire building,” says this architect, “is built for these screens because everything else, the structure, the facilities are subordinate to them, since they asked us for the most spectacular screen in the world, immersive, with a sphere.” Geometry . “360 degrees, and everything is derived from here.”
And the person primarily responsible for this complexity is not even 30 years old. Cristina Simón, a 29-year-old architect from Teruel, pregnant with her first child and a computer science project (she is in the third year of her studies), is the author of many of these clever and complex calculations. He had not yet completed architecture at the University of Zaragoza when he began work at Studio Fontgivel and, in his opinion, it was “the key to the entire external facade”. A female and pluralistic team that surprised Fontgivel himself because “it is not common to see so many STEM women leading a technology project.”
The Zaragoza-based company Oboria/Saco, which is predominantly made up of women, is behind the creation of Madison Square Garden in Las Vegas. The team is led by Miguel Fontgivel.Rocío Badiola
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“There are more and more women in these disciplines,” says Cristina. Together with Adela Pérez, Beatriz Carnicer and Ana Sabater, young architects and engineers, she was responsible for the implementation of this project, which, as Cristina explains, “represented a gigantic challenge because of its dimensions and because it no longer exists”. much further. Beyond architecture, new disciplines are emerging that combine programming with calculations and design.” As his boss summarizes, it is “a job of cross-pollination.” The design is so complex, says Fontgivel, “that it would have been impossible using conventional means.”
Another of his young professionals knows this well. Juan José Martínez, 30 years old, designer, or Manuel Mayorga, industrial engineer, who led the BIM (3D computing) model on the interior screen. For all of them, this was their greatest work. And they were responsible for tiling this spherical geometry with high mathematical complexity, which required connecting parts, facade and structure.
But despite its youth, the Fontgivel team is beginning to gain experience with these challenges. His company Oboria was created as a spin-off from Vubari Global, the company responsible for designing the LED screen for the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in 2017. And hence this order that they also placed with the help of another of their companies, SACO, with a subsidiary in Canada and which was responsible for manufacturing the parts.
Set in a studio with a view, overlooking the street leading to the Pilar Basilica in Zaragoza, it is furnished by Ikea, Fontgivel’s operational headquarters. And offers for major projects are already arriving from different parts of the world, “which I cannot disclose due to confidentiality agreements” and which predict exponential growth. Everything shows, he says, “that you can think globally from a provincial capital.” He learned it at the Zaragoza Expo (2008), when the team of then mayor Juan Alberto Belloch commissioned him to manage the city pavilion at the exhibition. He was only 25 years old. Today he will not be in Las Vegas for the opening of the sphere because his partner, also a studio worker, is about to give birth to their first child. But they will celebrate from a distance to the rhythm of U2, the band that will premiere because it has closed exclusive concerts in this space until December