Stadium Rockers

The world's leading architects are getting serious about designing extraordinary stadiums, writes Greg Callaghan....

“An iconic stadium can put a city on the world map,” says Paul Henry, a senior principal of HOK Sport, the international practice that did the master plan for the Nanjing Sports Park in China and is responsible for acclaimed Australian projects such as Skilled Park on the Gold Coast and Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. “It has the potential to be the most important building a community can own. A host of factors – including the fiscal weight of globalised sport and the trend towards integrated sports and entertainment facilities – means that stadiums are coming of age.”

Cox, whose company the Cox Group designed the new MCG and is working on Melbourne’s eye-catching Rectangular Stadium, says that stadiums are becoming like hotels, with food courts, leisure, entertainment and conference facilities. No longer, he adds, “are people prepared to put up with hard benches and being exposed to the elements”. When a stadium is well designed and centrally located it can be the centrepiece of a city.

Some of the stadiums popping up across Europe and Asia are revolutionary in shape and format. There’s the new home stadium for Valencia CF in Spain, which will look like a squashed metallic soccer ball when it opens this year (unlike traditional rectangular soccer stadiums, this one curves around a tight seating bowl, giving everyone a view of the match). Dublin’s Lansdowne Road Stadium, due to be completed in early 2010, looks like a transparent wave, a shimmering swell that reflects the colour of the sky. And Singapore’s Sports Hub, featuring an egg-shaped stadium with a retractable roof, is set to open in 2011.

“What this is all about,” says Henry, “is designing a stadium with the maximum goosebump factor.” Sporting venues, he adds, perhaps more than any other public building, resonate with the emotion of past and present glories. “There’s the anticipation of arriving at the arena, soaking up the atmosphere of the crowd and feeling so close to the action that you could imagine you’re on the field.”

Some new stadiums are not only landmark structures but also catalysts for the revitalisation of entire city precincts. The Emirates Stadium in north London, the new home of the Arsenal soccer team, is at the centre of one of Britain’s largest urban regeneration projects, while the team’s old home, the art deco Highbury Stadium, is being converted into 700 apartments on four sides of the much-revered old pitch. The Nanjing Sports Park in China, one of the largest venues in the world, is the centrepiece of a new downtown precinct to the west of the ancient capital. The main stadium’s distinctive toroidal roof, composed of a lightweight transparent polycarbonate, provides cover for 95 per cent of the seats while preserving a feeling of openness....
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...012694,00.html
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I don't know if anyone else saw the above on the weekend, but it certainly had me hoping that someone brought it to the attention of our government.

It is not intended as any sort of criticism of rugby's position on MES, but the situation in Perth is in such stark contrast to things in the region. Aside from the Asian stadia in the articles, look at Bronski Beat's (hijacked) Dunedin stadium thread - this link http://www.ourstadium.co.nz/flythrough.html gives a fly-through of the stadium, and remember that this is the stadium for a town of 120,000 people. A$150M and we wouldn't even need the roof or enclosed ends. But we, as a state capital, have...? To get the same capacity at MES, now or in the future, we will have to spend the same money and it will remain a bodge. Yet this will be the only stadium routinely broadcast internationally as representative of Perth.

It has probably been posted before, but look at the stats for the Melbourne rectangular stadium (http://www.majorprojects.vic.gov.au/...nt&Expand=1.3&). Cutting edge design, multi-purpose uses over and above rugby, in a state capital that already has numerous other facilities. Yet they can find the money, and I don't hear anyone complaining how they have to go interstate to get their kids to hospital. Siege mentalities and parochialism are all well and good, but while there are many things to be proud of here, governance and infrastructure planning would have to come an extraordinarily long way down the list.

Sticking to stadia as a theme, the government had the opportunity a few years ago to do something unique - they could have put aside a precinct for sport in the heart of a major city, in direct proximity to an already established entertainment precinct, served by all of the transport infrastructure from every direction, with access to most of the parking for the Perth and minimal nearby residential developments. But no, apparently some more shops are better.

Yet they are about to do it again. Whilst dropping the major stadium project is understandable, deciding that the East Perth power station site should be residential is anything but! If it is not going to be used for a museum, it is the obvious site to reserve for an iconic major stadium in a spectacular location. More importantly, it would establish a loose sporting area encompassing MES and the WACA, with at least some possibility of shared benefit and transport infrastructure. But no, in a few years time it will instead be "Hmmm, now, where should we put that stadium again?"

Never mind daylight savings, maybe we should have a regular referendum to review performance of government and adjust their pay scales accordingly...