On a housing façade the scaffold advances along a flat plane: the same bay, the same storey height, a repeating pattern. On long-span work (stadiums, sports halls, hangars, exhibition buildings), none of that pattern exists. Four things change the planning.
01The ground is not the same everywhere
Under the stands there is sloping concrete, on the pitch side there is fill, and in between runs the route the plant drives along. On the same project the surface under the base plate varies from point to point; some places need timber packing, others a concrete pad. Making sure the ground carries the load of the shoring and the access scaffold is the first job.
02Height alone is not the problem; span is
On long-span structures the temporary works are usually stressed horizontally rather than vertically: long beams, cantilever canopies, roof trusses. The shoring tower layout follows those spans; tower spacing cannot be chosen as it would be on a standard façade job.
We compared towers and tables under a slab in a separate article.
03The access route matters as much as the design
A crew working at stand height cannot climb down for every load of material. The number and position of stair towers is planned from the start; work positions should be within walking distance of an access point. We covered this in the stair tower article.
04Several crews on the same site
Concrete, steel, façade and roofing crews all work at once. The scaffold is erected and struck to suit the sequence of all the work, not one crew's programme. If the striking schedule is not agreed early, the scaffold either holds up the work or comes down early and goes back up. Both cost money.
What this looks like in our work
On projects such as the Ankara 19 Mayıs Stadium, the Şükrü Saracoğlu sports complex, the Mersin Olympic Games Stadium and indoor swimming pool halls, the flanged system was used in the roof and stand areas, with shoring towers and table formwork underneath the slabs. On this kind of work the take-off is usually not produced in one go but in phases: striking one phase feeds the erection of the next.
Send us your section drawings and the programme, and we will plan phase by phase which system goes where.