Beautiful Moves: Designing Stadia constructs the first architectural canon for the stadium as a building type, tracing how this most public of structures became a proving ground for architectural ambition, civic identity, and formal invention.
About This Book
The stadium is architecture at its most exposed — vast, contested, and watched by millions. Benjamin Flowers argues that over the past three decades, the stadium has evolved from a functional container into one of the most architecturally complex building types in the urban landscape. Organised chronologically and drawing on built, unbuilt, and demolished examples from across the world, this study places stadium design within a serious architectural discourse for the first time. Flowers examines how A-list practices were increasingly commissioned to produce stadia as civic monuments and markers of identity, resulting in some of the most technically demanding and formally inventive structures of the contemporary built environment.
Key Features
- 176 pages of architectural analysis spanning built, unbuilt, and demolished stadium projects
- By Benjamin Flowers
- Projects by Lina Bo Bardi, Frei Otto, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Herzog & de Meuron, Foster + Partners, and Studio Gang
- Published by Lund Humphries, ISBN 9781848222243
What You'll Discover
- How the stadium shifted from utilitarian infrastructure to a primary site of architectural experimentation and civic monumentality
- The first chronologically organised canon for stadium design as a distinct architectural type
- The role of prize-winning and internationally recognised practices in reshaping client expectations and the formal ambitions of stadium briefs
- How stadia function as icons of urban identity, with defining consequences for the built landscape of cities around the world
About the Author
Benjamin Flowers is the author of this study on stadium architecture as an emerging canonical building type. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 176
- Dimensions: 190 × 250 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781848222243
- Publisher: Lund Humphries
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, urban designers, and academics with an interest in large-scale public infrastructure, sports architecture, and the intersection of civic identity with contemporary architectural practice.