STADIUMS AND SPORTS FACILITIES: THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE’S CATHEDRALS
To define a football field "the temple of football" means that you attribute at that structure an architectural and social value that goes beyond the sport itself.
"The stadium is now like a civil building, as the people use it as if it was a church or a city hall". These are Jon Niemuth words, from the famed architectural studio Aecom Ellerbe Becket, specialized in stadium design.
Stadiums and sports facilities frequented by metropolitan populations today assume a new centrality for the contemporary society: as dynamic attraction centers, they can harmoniously adapt to the shape of the landscape by exalting its beauty, like the very suggestive Estádio Municipal de Braga, a football field carved into the rock of Monte Castro in Portugal).
In this context, it is engineer and architects task to create buildings that are places of aggregation, entertainment and sport as well, responding to aesthetic and functional requirements. These installations are placed into the urban complex and so they want to reflect the spirit of the place, representing a kind of city in the city, which is self-sufficient about services, transports and connections. It is above all built to deal with specifics environmental characteristics and to resist to particular atmospheric agents.
High temperatures and wetness accompanied 2014 World Cup and the fourth Germany's victory. An important opportunity of requalification for the Country, performed by Brazil through the study and the planning of an innovative sporting landscape, with designers from all over the world who realized avant-garde architectures.
For some installations they used integration ways in the surrounding landscape that made them enter in the unofficial list of the most original stadiums and sports facilities in the world. Not only for realizations to the limit of bizarre, but also for an exceptional ability of architects and engineers to find more efficient solutions of resistance in remote places, facing the most hostile temperatures without giving up the aesthetic taste and the visual interaction with the landscape often breathtaking.
Ambitious projects that require an high technical level of the materials, as it is for DSG Ceramics products for the more unpredictable needing for external surfaces flooring, with a special system of porcelain gres tiles in 120x120 (and sub formats) thickness 24 mm. An high performing solution for coverings that is able to last in time, to withstand temperature changes, water, frost, spots and molds, weights and loads out of the ordinary (just think about the 80.000 supporters who filled Maracanà only during the tournament's final). It is the ideal to guarantee a mix of beauty, duration and safety.
From the Adidas Futsal Park on a Tokyo's skyscraper to the highest tennis court in the world, on the top of Burj al-Arab Hotel in Dubai, the sports architectures are increasingly disseminated, built in unusual and impervious places. On the contrary, other plants are distinguishes just for the peculiarities wherewith they challenge the territory's limits.
With the stadiums realized for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the San Paolo Arena Corinthians should be mentioned, whose structure presents an enormous glass window on the east side, that is the largest video display ever made in the world. On the contrary, Das Dunas's undulating shape answers to the requests of the local climate, by protecting the supporters from the direct sun light and by channeling the sea breeze through the airshaft windows of the modulus petal shaped that composes the structure. These asymmetric petal's function (higher on one side of the stadium) is to recreate the impression of sand dunes in motion, reproducing the scenery of the city. The aluminum tiles that cover the petals also guarantee the thermal insulation.
Moving eastward, here there is the Singapore's Float at Marina Bay. The stadium, projected with materials studied to deal with tropical temperatures and a high humidity, is 120 meters long, 83 meters large and can support up to 1.070 tons. Its originality element? To overcome the known space problems in the city, the Float at Marina Bay it was built directly on the sea and fixed to the soil by using special pylons.
And about water, a special chapter should be dedicated to the most unusual swimming pools built in seemingly inaccessible places, places in which it is fundamental to associate aesthetic characteristics of merit and important technical and resistance values and practicality of use values. DSG knows it, being just the swimming pool setting - as well as for gym and spa - the place in which the materials created by the Company are mostly used to guarantee safety and anti-slip. So stay tuned, we will soon speak about swimming pools!
(Credits 2. Visit Portugal Official; 3. Bottarelli/Getty Images/FIFA; 4. Burj al-Arab Hotel; 5-6. Getty Images/FIFA; 7. Briden/Alamy).