Stadium Design

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A diaphanous "stadium light" from the Pritzker Prize-winning firm redefines the soccer experience for fans in southwest France. Herzog & de Meuron's Nouveau Stade de Bordeaux.  A new soccer stadium designed by Herzog & de Meuron in Bordeaux, France hosted its first game on May 23rd (the FC Girondins vs. Monpelier), a year before one of the sport’s most high-stakes tournaments—Euro 2016, the European Championship and qualifier for the 2017 World Cup—is played there. With 42,000 seats, the 830,000-square-foot stadium is one of the largest in the region, where soccer has a religious following. Drawing on the spiritual hold

Making a Splash: Designed by MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects, a public aquatic center, surrounded by a park in a mixed-income city housing development, proves public recreational facilities needn't skimp on high-concept design.

Of the many neoclassical buildings that architect John Galen Howard designed for the University of California, Berkeley, in the early twentieth century, California Memorial Stadium was perhaps the most breathtaking and the most imperiled: from its perch at the base of the Berkeley foothills, the concrete structure—part coliseum, part amphitheater dug into the hillside—offered 73,000 Golden Bears fans sweeping views of San Francisco Bay to the west, but on a site straddling the Hayward Fault.

Though it isn't quite all tumbleweed and Longhorns on the 20-minute drive from downtown Austin to the Circuit of the Americas (COTA)—the only facility in the United States specifically built to host the Formula 1 Grand Prix auto race—the barren landscape looks and feels like rural Texas.

The gargantuan structure sits just beyond several neighborhoods of quaint brownstone rowhouses characteristic of this New York City borough.

The tumult of Kiev's postwar history is evident in its architecture: The bombast of Stalin's elephantine classicism was abruptly superseded by swaths of grimly utilitarian housing after Khrushchev's turn against “unnecessary excess.” 

For five uneasy years, the building team responsible for delivering the San Francisco 49ers' $1 billion new home had hung together through three work hiatuses, a recession, and a regrouping caused by a site relocation 45 miles to the south—from San Francisco's Candlestick Point to Silicon Valley's Santa Clara.

In a country fueled by a love for sports, it seems strange that only 23 years ago there were no soccer-specific stadiums in the U.S.