Rafael Sabelli
Senior Principal, Director of Seismic Design, Walter P. Moore
Friday, March 7, 2025 | 11:00 a.m. | 140 Ketter Hall
The state-of-the-art SoFi Stadium was showcased in Super Bowl LVI in 2022, a fitting nod to several years of design and construction work. This project posed a tremendous structural and geotechnical challenge, including deep excavation, dramatic soil retention, high seismicity, and long spans. To meet these challenges, the design team divided the project into a small set of large but manageable component projects.
The first carve-out was the 100-foot, 2.4-million-cubic-yard open-cut excavation and massive 265,000-square-foot mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) retention system. This deep excavation was necessary to keep the overall building height below the clearance required for aircraft approaching nearby Los Angeles International Airport.
Complicating all design scenarios was the highly seismic environment, with the Newport-Inglewood Fault and Compton Blind-Thrust Fault located near the stadium site. A key geotechnical and structural challenge was ensuring that the free-standing cable-net stadium roof remained completely isolated from both the stadium structure and the MSE wall system.
This presentation will discuss the specialty design and construction management of these systems in detail. It will cover the difficulties of coordinating four separate geotechnical consultants/designers, the challenges of forming an independent peer review panel and achieving consensus on a complex series of designs, managing the interaction between the City of Inglewood’s plan check process and the peer review panel, and constructing geotechnical and structural work separately from the rest of the stadium bowl—all while staying on the critical path.
Rafael Sabelli is a Senior Principal and Director of Seismic Design at Walter P Moore. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award and a Special Achievement Award from AISC, as well as the T.R. Higgins Lectureship Award.
He is a member of the AISC Committee on Specifications, serving as vice chair of the Technical Committee on Seismic Provisions. He also serves on the AISC Committee on Manuals, where he chairs the Seismic Design Manual committee. Additionally, he is a member of the ASCE 7 Main Committee and Seismic Task Committee, as well as the NIST Building Seismic Safety Council’s Provisions Update Committee.
Sabelli is the co-author of Ductile Design of Steel Structures and has written extensively on the design and behavior of steel seismic systems. He has published numerous technical papers on braced frames, connection design, and structural stability. He is also a past president of the Structural Engineers Association of California.
As the Structural Engineer of Record, Sabellie has led landmark projects, including the award-winning San Francisco International Airport Air Traffic Control Tower and SoFi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams.