The ABBA Arena has been named the #1 most influential project in Europe and #5 most influential project worldwide in the 2022
ABBA Arena ha sido nombrado proyecto N°1 en Europa y el proyecto N°5 en el mundo por PMI.org
PMI org enumera los proyectos más influyentes de 2022 por región y en el mundo.
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The ABBA Arena has been named the #1 most influential project in Europe and #5 most influential project worldwide in the 2022 Most Influential Projects list by the Project Management Institute! We are honored to be featured amongst these exciting and groundbreaking projects. Learn more about #ABBAarena and the other projects driving innovation and change around the world here
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Nov 16th, 2022
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PMI org lists the most influential projects of 2022 by region and in the world.
PMI’s 2022 edition of Most Influential Projects
ABBA Arena 2022 Most Influential Projects: Creative Innovation
N°1 project in Europe and the N°5 project in the world!
ABBA Voyage
Entertainment | Europe
Pop superstars ABBA returned to the stage after 40 years—this time as a virtual sensation. The ABBA Voyage concert experience in London bridged the gap between the physical and digital by showcasing digital avatars of the Swedish musical group (so-called Abbatars) dancing and singing alongside a 10-piece live band. The six-year, US$175 million project involved Stufish Entertainment Architects creating a purpose-built ABBA Arena and visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic making digital twins of the Super Trouper singers. As Abba’s Benny Andersson says: “It’s a bloody good concert—that’s what it is.”
Most Influential Projects 2022 in the world
05 ABBA Voyage
Entertainment | Europe
ABBA Voyage
For creating a moveable feast of pop culture spectacle
Mamma Mia, here they go again: Pop superstars ABBA have returned to the stage after a 40-year absence. This time around, though, the band is using a power pack combo of bleeding-edge tech and innovative venue design to bridge the gap between the physical and digital realms. Tapping into an unprecedented mix of light and sound, ABBA Voyage features digital avatars—ABBAtars, if you will—of the Swedish super group dancing and singing alongside a 10-piece live band at purpose-built stadium in London.
The six-year, US$175 million project to create digital twins of the Dancing Queen singers—all of them now in their 70s—was a masterclass in not just harnessing new technologies, but in collaboration. Working closely with George Lucas’ visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the team was able to craft hyper-realistic virtual versions of band members Agnetha Fältskog, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson.
“People have often talked about whether you can create either people who have lived in the past or people when they were younger, and we actually create ABBA in their prime—1979,” says Ben Morris, ILM’s creative director in the show’s announcement video.
To make the avatars as lifelike as possible, the team used hundreds of cameras to film ABBA’s members along with four body doubles in motion-capture suits over five weeks. Then, 850 team members across four of ILM’s global studios developed and animated the avatars. Project leaders also modernized ABBA’s iconic outfits, dressing the ABBAtars in designs by Dolce & Gabbana and Erevos Aether.
But creating the ABBAtars was only half the challenge—the team also had to build a space that could bring them to life. So U.K. entertainment architecture studio Stufish joined the project in 2019, designing and building the 3,000-person ABBA Arena.
“We knew it was going to be a little bit of a hybrid between a theater, an arena and a cinema,” says Alicia Tkacz, a partner and architect at Stufish in London. “The show and arena were an undefined genre of entertainment that we were all creating from scratch.”
Stufish’s team traveled to Stockholm to meet with the show’s producers, ILM and ABBA to gather requirements. That included a request that the design be fully demountable, which will allow the building to be taken down and relocated to other cities.
“As a studio, we have been very interested in developing touring venues, fusing our knowledge of touring shows and permanent venues,” Tkacz says. “This project allowed us to realize this ambition and design a fully demountable structure. The concept of taking a production and venue of this scale to people is really exciting.”
The project team quickly settled on a site in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. But because the land was contaminated, the team had to design the structure in a way that wouldn’t require waste removal. The solution: situate the structure as much as possible on tarmac, so its foundations only penetrated the ground in 18 places. The arena’s roof—a 744-metric-ton semi-axisymmetric steel dome—was built on the ground, then lifted via strand jacks into position.
Throughout the build, Stufish had to stay hush-hush about its confidential design work—not an easy ask, considering planning applications must be accessible to the public. To ensure ABBA’s grand comeback remained a secret, the team submitted designs with the word “Logo” on the building’s front, which intentionally had the same character count as the eventual name on the arena: ABBA.
With the show’s production plans and the arena’s construction happening concurrently, the team needed clear decision-making processes to keep everyone aligned—and on schedule. “This complex project took a lot of diligence within the teams,” Tkacz says. “There were clear lines of responsibility and decision-making. The processes and approvals steps needed to be clear from the start, to ensure we met the ambitious timeline.”
Stufish completed the arena in April, and ABBA Voyage debuted in May to rave reviews, with The Guardian declaring it a “dazzling retro-futurist extravaganza.” Shows are scheduled through May 2023, but the project’s legacy could extend much further, as other acts seek to merge bespoke arenas with digital experiences—and other entertainment companies look to squeeze every nostalgia-infused drop from older acts.
“It’s an amazing integration of live music now and voices from the past,” ABBA’s Ulvaeus says. “It’s an amazing illusion.” Bandmate Andersson gives it the ultimate endorsement: “It’s a bloody good concert—that’s what it is.”
Listen to Stufish partner and architect Alicia Tkacz discuss how team members collaborated to create the ABBA Voyage show and its bespoke arena at the same time.
As entertainment architects, we’re show designers and we’re arch itects. We really see our role as being one role—obviously designing this bespoke venue, but designing it alongside the show means that they both work in tandem with each other, and we can ensure that everything that the creative team needs from a show perspective is reflected in the architecture and vice versa. But what was really important for this project in particular is that the physical world is reflected in the digital world. So they had to be concurrently speaking to each other, and the relationship between where the physical world ends and the digital world starts was critical in making this show work.
It was a very collaborative team of people. We had, obviously, Svana [Gisla] and Ludvig [Andersson], the producers; Baillie Walsh, the director; Industrial Light & Magic obviously brought that kind of cinematic experience and film experience; and then there was a team of more traditional live show designers. So, the kind of worlds colliding, I suppose, could’ve been a real baptism of fire but actually, it just worked. And I think it took a lot of diligence within the teams. There’s a lot of people involved so the management [is critical], making sure there’s a clear line of responsibility, who’s making the decisions, the steps it needs to go through to ultimately get approval. It was very, very clear so everybody knew the process from the start, which really helped.
As a studio and as a company, we’re very used to projects with very quick time scales. Once they decide the show is going to open, you can’t change that deadline, which is quite different maybe to some other building projects; there is a bit of flexibility in when the building opens. But with this, you have to open; when they sold the tickets for the first show, that’s it. It feels that there’s so much to do, but those last few months things just happen, and they just seem to all fit together, and all of these separate departments and companies who are working on their part, suddenly it all came together, and it was really great to finally have this arena. And when they came to start rehearsing the show, it all kind of made sense. This is why we’re all here, is for the show, and it was quite amazing.
https://www.pmi.org/most-influential-projects-2022/50-most-influential-projects-2022/abba-voyage
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https://www.pmi.org/learning/training-development/projectified-podcast/podcasts/2022-most-influential-projects-creative-innovation
Audio Transcript
STEVE HENDERSHOT
After two years of challenges, obstacles and delays stemming from the pandemic, 2022 was a year when project teams around the world rose to the moment to really go for it. Teams displayed innovation and creativity across industries and geographies, delivering solutions to some of the world’s pressing issues and, in some cases, making the way we live, work and play better, easier or more interesting. Take the ABBA Voyage project:
ABBA VOYAGE TRAILER
Hello, London!
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Pop superstars ABBA unveiled a custom arena designed to house a stunning show that bridges the physical and digital worlds. And it’s not just wowing audiences—the team members who worked on the project are in awe, too.
ALICIA TKACZ
It was amazing. We’d seen snippets of parts over the last three years, but to finally see it in context and in order, it was unbelievable.
NARRATOR
The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.
PMI’s 2022 edition of Most Influential Projects, or MIP, has arrived—and it’s epic. You want feats of engineering? How about the mega mobility project to create one of the largest high-speed rail systems in the world, connecting 60 cities across Egypt? There’s also an electric motorbike designed, developed and built in Kenya, coming in at a cost of just $1,500 U.S. dollars. You want ecological innovation? How about the project in India to reintroduce cheetahs into its forests and grasslands?
The 2022 Most Influential Projects include more than 200 remarkable efforts showcasing creative problem-solving and sheer gumption. I encourage you to head to MIP.PMI.org to binge on global project innovation. There’s an overall top 50, and also Top 10 lists spanning a range of regions and sectors.
We’re going to speak to a couple of the leaders behind these projects on the show today, beginning with Alicia Tkacz, a partner and architect at entertainment architecture studio Stufish in London. Her team worked with ABBA to create the ABBA Arena, a purpose-built venue for the ABBA Voyage show, No. 5 on this year’s Most Influential Projects.
ABBA Voyage brings the Swedish supergroup back to the stage as digital avatars, dancing and singing alongside a live band. Alicia spoke with Projectified®’s Hannah LaBelle about how collaboration between producers, animators, architects and the band itself resulted in a uniquely immersive concert experience.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
HANNAH LABELLE
The ABBA Arena plays a big part in putting on the ABBA Voyage show. Tell me about the venue and how Stufish got involved in the project.
ALICIA TKACZ
It’s a 3,000-capacity arena, and from the very beginning, we knew that it was going to be a mixture of standing and seated audience, and roughly it’s about 60 percent seated and 40 percent standing. We always knew it was going to be a little bit of a hybrid between a theater, [an] arena concert [and] a cinema. It’s kind of an undefined genre of entertainment, which we were creating from scratch.
We were approached in April 2019 by Svana Gisla, one of the executive producers. They were looking at creating a team to both develop the show but also the venue that they knew they wanted to build; because it was such a bespoke project, it needed its own venue really. So we went over to Stockholm in June 2019, along with ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] and the producers, and we met with Benny [Andersson] and Björn [Ulvaeus] and really just started the conversation about what is this? We knew we had to find a plot of land quite quickly, and we settled on the Pudding Mill Lane site, which is inside the Olympic Park in East London.
HANNAH LABELLE
So the arena was designed in tandem with the show to meet the requirements of the technology that was going to be involved. You led the design of the building, and you also served as a stage designer for ABBA Voyage. What exactly does that entail in terms of your role when it comes to not only the arena build but also the concert itself?
ALICIA TKACZ
As entertainment architects, we’re show designers and we’re architects. We really see our role as being one role, in terms of designing this bespoke venue, but designing it alongside the show means that they both work in tandem with each other, and we can ensure that everything that the creative team needs from a show perspective is reflected in the architecture and vice versa. But what was really important for this project in particular is that the physical world is reflected in the digital world. So they had to be concurrently speaking to each other, and the relationship between where the physical world ends and the digital world starts was critical in making this show work.
HANNAH LABELLE
You worked with people across the project: the producers, the director, ABBA, animators, engineers and construction teams. What was the collaboration process like, and what were some good practices you established when it came to making sure that everybody stayed aligned?
ALICIA TKACZ
It was a very collaborative team of people. We had Svana and Ludvig [Andersson], the producers; Baillie Walsh, the director; Industrial Light & Magic obviously brought that cinematic experience and film experience; and then there was a team of traditional live show designers. The worlds colliding, I suppose, could’ve been a real baptism of fire, but actually it just worked. It took a lot of diligence within the teams, making sure there’s a clear line of responsibility: who’s making the decisions, the steps it needs to go through ultimately to get approval. It was very, very clear so everybody knew the process from the start, which really helped.
HANNAH LABELLE
One of the main design aspects of the venue is that it’s fully demountable, so it can be taken apart and moved to a new location. Why was this a requirement for the project, and what challenges or opportunities did it add?
ALICIA TKACZ
They knew that they wanted to ultimately tour this around the world. Obviously, it’s not like a stadium or an arena tour that we would typically work on which is a few days in each place, so it’ll be a lot longer. It makes the project a lot more complicated in that you have to think about every single connection, every single detail, because it has to be taken down and then put up again. We really were looking to that temporary structure. Everything has to be taken down, so all the connections and everything need to be able to be removed, but then it also needs to be physically moved in trucks or containers so all of the sizing of all the parts is crucial as well. All of that had to be taken into account from the start, which makes it pretty complicated, but then it’s going to give the project a longer life cycle.
HANNAH LABELLE
What other challenges did the team have to overcome in the arena’s design and build?
ALICIA TKACZ
All of the Olympic Park area in London is on contaminated land; you can only go down like two foot before you hit the layer of contamination. We didn’t want to penetrate the ground too much because then you have to deal with getting rid of the contaminated waste. So the biggest challenge was designing the structure so that it sits as much as possible on the tarmac, and we only actually penetrate the ground in 18 places where we have large-pad foundations. Other than that, the whole structure sits on the tarmac. So that, from an engineering point of view, was a massive challenge. But [it] also helps with the demountability of course because then we can take it down much easier. That took a while to get right. And even when we had designed the foundations, when we started on-site and started drilling down, we found there was a lot of old iron Victorian pipes and things in the ground which we kept hitting. Those ground conditions forced us to change the structure and to make it work with the site but also keep that demountability in mind.
HANNAH LABELLE
What impact do you think ABBA Voyage and the arena will have on the future of entertainment? How do you think the show could change arena designs and concert experiences moving forward?
ALICIA TKACZ
From a show perspective, particularly in these last few years with COVID, we had a massive shift. We couldn’t go out with our shows, so suddenly everyone was stuck at home, and everyone was relying on digital content. I think moving forward, people want to be physically together, and I think we’ve seen there’s a desire to get back and see live music and live entertainment. But I think that layer of digital influence is something that’s going to be pushed more and more in the coming years.
From an architectural point of view, the idea of a touring venue is something, as a studio, we’ve always been interested in developing and looking at, but it’s very hard to commercially make sense. The ABBA Voyage project has shown that it can happen, and you can design a light touch building that doesn’t need big masses of concrete. We can use steel and timber really effectively to create structures that can move around, and I think that will make sense more economically in the future, rather than building a theater that’s going to last for 200 years in one place. The idea that it can go to people is really exciting.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Dubai isn’t known for its farmland. Yet it’s now home to the world’s largest vertical farm, a hydroponic facility that opened in July 2022 and will supply more than 2 million pounds of leafy greens to Emirates Flight Catering, serving airlines that fly out of Dubai International Airport. The project, ranked No. 22 on the MIP list, was a collaboration between Emirates Flight Catering and Crop One, a sustainable agriculture company based in Millis, Massachusetts, in the U.S. I spoke with a fellow Steve H.—Steve Hebda, VP of farm development at Crop One, about the project.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s start with technology and impact. How are you growing vegetables at scale in the desert, and what’s the broader potential for this sort of solution?
STEVE HEBDA
We’re a controlled-environment vertical farm. It means that we literally are controlling everything that the plant comes in contact with—so the air, the light, the water. That yields us a very clean, high-yielding product that has great flavor and great taste.
What gets me excited about coming into the office is really how we’re evolving and making sure that we put our plants-first technology to the forefront, but that we’re also having an impact on changing farming as a whole and helping the world community really grow and be able to sustain life as we move on. Vertical farming brings quite a bit of sustainability as far as water use and land use goes, and those are things that are obviously key.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
In addition to the challenges inherent in building the world’s largest vertical farm, you also had to do it with team members located across the globe. How did you handle the obstacles that invariably go along with a first-of-its-kind project, and also from coordinating across great distances?
STEVE HEBDA
Project managers really focus on communication and communicating that story well, right? I like to call it an interpreter role in some way. So we have to really be able to put on our hat and speak with our plant science team and talk to them about what’s important for the needs of the plant. But then we need to turn around and go speak to an engineer or an architect or a contractor or even a tradesperson and be able to communicate that need and why that’s important to them. So that was probably the most critical piece that we needed to do. And how did we overcome that? Through a lot of training and a lot of conversations.
It would’ve been so great to be able to hop onto a plane, but unfortunately it was the height of COVID. So we really had to react to that, and obviously taking advantage of all the different calls or whichever meeting group that we could get into because somebody’s computer might have had a problem with being able to do that. We overcame that fairly quickly, and then it was just a lot of the traditional construction project-type timeline delays that you have to overcome: How do you re-look at the schedule to make up time because a certain item might be a few weeks late?
STEVE HENDERSHOT
How did you go about not just communicating but also building the relational trust, fluidity, all the stuff that an effective team has, given both the distance between team members and COVID? How did you turn this into a cohesive team?
STEVE HEBDA
So a cohesive team was really built by starting out with small group teams that we would move together, and again, there was the challenge that many folks had never met each other. They were literally all over the world: We had engineers in London, and then we had ourselves in Millis, Massachusetts, and then we had the folks in Dubai, some folks were calling in from India. It really was a worldwide project, so just trying to develop some of that trust over the phone, in those Zoom calls, taking a little bit of time just to talk to people about who they were and what was going on with them, just to understand who and what you were working with.
Building that trust, once that was there, that made it easier. And then really great project management. It’s really understanding that scope of work, how long is it going to take, and are you on budget—managing that and making that a central priority. And then just making sure that at the end of every meeting, if there were task and meeting minutes that needed to go out, that people understood what they were responsible for so that they could bring it back to the next meeting or at the next deliverable point.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
The farm opened in July. Have you tried any of the food grown on-site?
STEVE HEBDA
I have tasted the sample. I’ve sampled items there, and our chief plant scientist was telling us he had a conference in Dubai, and the salad that he got while he was on the plane was our salad. So it was pretty exciting to actually see him taking a picture at 30,000 feet on a project that we’ve all invested quite a bit of time in. It’s great seeing the product in the retail stores. We’ve had engineers that worked on the project or contractor folks, or even some of our own employees that are on the farm, snap a shot of the product actually in the retail stores.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
What will you pull out of this project and experience that will inform Crop One’s future efforts?
STEVE HEBDA
The takeaway for us is going to be the scalability of it. [We’re] really excited to take the lessons learned on scaling and how to make sure that we have an adequate facility done and really taking that and applying that to the future farms.
One of the big pieces that we’re looking at is taking advantage of more technology and actually automating more of the process. So again, part of keeping these plants first and keeping them safe and clean is reducing the amount of touch points. When the folks in Dubai go into a room the plants are growing in, we make sure that they suit up and that they have gloves on, and they have their face mask on, and they have their hair nets and their lab coats on. We’re trying to reduce that by using automation so that we’ll have a lot less folks that will actually go into the rooms, and there’ll be less need to interact with the plants that way.
The legacy with this is really how vertical farming is changing the way farming has to happen. We’re just so proud to be involved in this project and really being the first full-scale farm to be able to help make that change. Because of the challenges that are going to face the world as far as population growth and the weather extremes, we know that this institution is going to continue to grow, and I’m really super proud to be a part of that.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Project teams built amazing things over the last year, and to see them presented in PMI’s Most Influential Projects package is to be inspired. So head there—MIP.PMI.org—and get a creative jolt. Who knows? Maybe next year your project will make the list.
NARRATOR
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https://www.pmi.org/learning/training-development/projectified-podcast/podcasts/2022-most-influential-projects-creative-innovation
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