Ben Harstad

June 11, 2012

WRIT 340

Retiro Park Blog Post

Soccer Fields & Associated Civil Engineering

            The art of creating soccer fields comes down to the perfect balance of engineering and landscaping, and the Retiro park soccer fields are no exception.  The natural landscape of the Retiro park area is naturally very hilly and differentiating in terms of altitude, so the ability of creating the perfectly flat fields in the middle of the park shows the capability of the civil engineers who designed it.  The basic layout of the soccer fields include a total of two indoor-sized (smaller than outdoor regulation size) fields that lay parallel next to each other.  In the designing and construction of this facility, the civil engineers needed to take into consideration everything else that was being constructed in the park, including the excavation necessary for the lake, and the addition of land to be added to the spiraling path to summit the highest (man-made) elevation in the park.  Through all the construction of the park, dirt needed to be properly distributed to the location in the park where in was needed, and pulled from the placed that had extra to give.  In the case of the soccer fields, they are in an overall elevated area compared to its immediate surrounding, and the rest of the park.  To create this perfectly flat, elevated space (that is large enough upon which to place multiple soccer fields), the engineers would have had to realize that they extra dirt would need to be removed from the equally large man-made lake that was created in the park.  It is this desired balance that needed to be planned for and achieved, not solely between the fields and lake, but all other aspects that were included in the construction of this park.