The engineering behind the world's biggest stage — home to football's biggest summer. Before a single ball was kicked under SoFi Stadium's record-breaking roof, every one of its 22,000 tons of steel lived inside a Tekla Structures model.
Every great team sheet starts with the stats. Here's what it took to build one of world football's biggest venues and one of the grandest stages.
SoFi is the first indoor-outdoor stadium ever constructed. Its translucent ETFE canopy shelters fans while flooding the bowl with Californian light — open on three sides, so a sea breeze rolls through like a proper open-air football ground.
A 20,000-ton steel compression ring anchors a double-grid cable net spanning over 1,000 feet — free-spanning further than ten football pitches laid end to end. Nothing like it had ever been attempted at this scale.
Sitting near the Newport–Inglewood fault, the roof is seismically isolated from the bowl. When the ground moves, the canopy floats independently on isolators — performance-based engineering pushed to the limit.
Hanging from the cable net is a 70,000-square-foot, dual-sided 4K video board weighing around 1,100 tons — strand-jacked into the sky and visible from every seat. The biggest big screen in sport.
Great football sides move as one unit — and so did SoFi's build team. Detailer DBM Vircon, structural engineer Walter P Moore and fabricator Schuff Steel all worked inside a single shared Tekla Structures model.
The roof's plated box compression ring, with its bi-directional tensioned cables, produced some of the most complicated steel connections ever detailed. Walter P Moore modelled those critical connections directly in Tekla and handed the geometry to DBM Vircon, who populated the remaining connections across the entire structure — roughly 70,000 drawings flowing from one source of truth to the fabrication shop.
No lost passes. No misread data. The project went on to win the 2021 Tekla North America BIM Award for Best Steel Project.
“There's basically no possibility for misinterpreting the data when we keep it in the model from the very early stages of design and share the same data with the detailer and fabricator throughout… It's this continuity of data that makes us confident that nothing will go wrong, especially with a geometrically complex project like SoFi Stadium.”
Every trophy-winning side needs a squad. Tap a shirt to meet the players who delivered SoFi — with Tekla Structures pulling the strings from the touchline.
A cross-section of the set-piece routine: compression ring, cable net, ETFE skin and the hanging Oculus — all coordinated to the millimetre in Tekla.
Four years, one unforgettable result. Here's how the build played out, minute by minute.
Ground breaks on the former Hollywood Park racetrack. The team digs the bowl 100 feet below grade so the stadium ducks under nearby LAX flight paths.
Giant concrete blade columns rise around the sunken bowl — the back four that will carry the iconic cable-truss roof. Every steel member is already living in the shared Tekla model.
The 20,000-ton compression ring goes up in 30 pre-assembled sections — single picks up to 250,000 lbs and 100 ft long, hauled in on dual-lane trailers with police escort.
The double-grid cable net — the largest ever built — is tensioned in 18 individual nets with pinning forces around 2,000 kips. Set-piece delivery, perfected in the model first.
The 1,100-ton, dual-sided Oculus video board is strand-jacked off the pitch and into the roof — a 70,000 sq ft screen woven into the cable net design.
SoFi Stadium opens. DBM Vircon's work with Tekla Structures is crowned Best Steel Project at the 2021 Tekla North America BIM Awards.
Super Bowl LVI in 2022. College football's championship in 2023. This summer, the world's favourite game takes centre stage on its biggest platform — and in 2028, the Olympic ceremonies follow. Not bad for a debut season.
Watch the official Tekla Software film on how SoFi Stadium came together.
From grassroots pitches to world stages, Tekla Structures turns the most ambitious structures into constructible reality.
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