MVRDV Zecc Architecten    Netherlands   MVRDV and Zecc Architecten have won the competition to turn St. Francis of Assissi Church in Heerlen, built over a hundred years ago and offering religious services until 2023, into a public swimming pool for the Dutch city. A key feature of the proj

Crea - arquitetos   Portugal   In Quinta do Campo Alegre, the project for the renovation and extension of the grandstand and headquarters of CDUP (Centro Desporto da Universidade do Porto) addresses the context of the stadium that opened in 1953. The original grandstand building

RAUM   France   The Nantes-based architecture firm Raum has refurbished and expanded a community swimming pool and spa center in Saint-Méen-Le-Grand, a picturesque locality in the northwestern French region of Brittany. There is a new sports pool and aqua-leisure ar

BOV Estudio   Spain   The new swimming pools in the municipality of Alfoz de Quintanadueñas, in the province of Burgos, are located on the boundary between the urban fabric and the agricultural fields. The building presents a succession of layers that unfold from its exte

NP2F SCAU Architecture   France   In the context of the Olympic Games, a pavilion rose on the Boulevard Périphérique that can accommodate large numbers of spectators while serving as a hub of activity for the community. On a plinth providing facilities for local associations emerge t

Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos   Mexico   The firm Sordo Madaleno designed a new home, in Zapopan, for one of Mexico’s most long-lived football teams, the Guadalajara-based Atlas F.C. Called Academia Atlas, it serves six professional fields and includes facilities for science applied to spor

Populous   Saudi Arabia   The masterplan drawn up by Populous for Riyadh has been unveiled. It includes King Salman Stadium, which, seating 92,000, will be among the world’s largest sports arenas. Programmed for completion late in 2029, it will be the primary headquarters of

Colectivo C733    Mexico   Helios Park, a baseball field in Ciudad Acuña – in the Mexican state of Coahuila – was clearly in a state of neglect and deterioration. An undertaking of SEDATU (Mexico’s Secretariat for Agrarian, Land, and Urban Development), the refurbishment sough

3XN CL MAP   Germany   A sports facility in Munich, close to the Olympic Stadium designed by Frei Otto and Günther Behnisch, was recently inaugurated. Named SAP Garden and located on the site of the old velodrome, it is the new home of the EHC Red Bull ice hockey team and

BeAr Architects   Spain   Located on the left bank of the Zubitegi stream, in the south zone of the Basque municipality of Mallabia, this sports park is the result of transforming an area damaged by the operations of an old water-treatment plant. The outdoor facilities optimi

Vector Architects   China   Protected by concrete shading panels, thirty-six classrooms are raised along the plot’s perimeter to free up the ground level, at the landscaped center of which begins a chain of ramps for vertical circulation. From an elevated running track encircli

L35 Architects gmp Architekten Ribas & Ribas   Spain   The main objective of the renovation was to give Real Madrid’s stadium more flexible and dynamic, readjusting its massive form to the scale of the city around it. The asymmetrical envelope flows with curved surfaces to reflect the diffused light in a

MVRDV Huayi Design   China   MVRDV – in collaboration with Huavi Design – has won the competition to design the Shenzhen Pingshan Sports Park in the east of Shenzhen, which is to include an arena for badminton tournaments and other athletic championships as well as the new Chine

Populous Oualalou + Choi   Morocco   In the Moroccan town of El Mansouria, 38 kilometers north of Casablanca, the 115,000-capacity Grand Stade Hassan II will be one of the largest football stadiums in the world and one of the new ones built for the World Cup of 2030, to be hosted jointl

Verne arquitectura Alejandro Maortua    Spain   A joint work of Verne arquitectura – Víctor Larripa, Javier Martínez, Daniel Ruiz de Gordejuela– and Alejandro Maortua, the project involved designing a pelota court and a series of spaces for different uses in Aguilar de Codés, a small locality in N

UAD Zhejiang   China   Located at the northwest corner of the Shaoxing University campus, these public sports facilities address the scarcity of land by stacking playing fields vertically, with a football pitch at the top. Designed by The Architectural Design & Researc

MAD Architects   China   Construction of the Cloud 9 Sports Center has now begun in Shijiazhuang, the capital of China’s northwestern province of Hebei, for completion in 2025. Designed by Ma Yansong/MAD Architects, the building encompasses 2,918 square meters undergound and

Henning Larsen   Faroe Islands   Situated within a picturesque fjord and protected against the Atlantic’s harsh winds while offering views of the neighboring islands, Klaksvík is the second-largest town in the Faroe Islands. The firm Henning Larsen was commissioned to design an urba

Fernanda Canales   Mexico   These premises are permeable to the city, seeking to use physical exercise and social interactions as a means of awakening in people a sense of belonging to the community. A simple sawtooth roof like those of nearby industries and a skin of perforate

Níall McLaughlin Architects   United Kingdom   Raised on a podium on the edge of a green meadow that serves as a cricket pitch, the Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre was designed in the manner of a theater in a garden. It had to engage not only with the parkland and nearby canals but also with the univer

Nikken Sekkei   Japan   On the campus of Waseda University in Honio, a city in Japan’s Saitama Prefecture, this three-story building contains facilities for sport training and meetings. The gym had to have natural indirect lighting, ideal for physical exercises done indoors

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   United States   The firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) – in collaboration with HNTB – has won the competition to build a baseball stadium in Las Vegas on a 3.6-hectare site on Las Vegas Boulevard, between Tropicana and Reno Boulevards. It will be the new home of the Ath

Brooks + Scarpa Architects   United States   The Los Angeles-based practice of Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa was commissioned to build a pavilion within the Youth Sports Complex, a park with facilities for football and lacrosse, for the City of Pompano Beach. Containing office space, restro

English football club Manchester United has announced plans to build a 100,000-seat stadium designed by Foster + Partners. The ambitious project will be erected near the 74,140-seat Old Trafford, which has been the team's home for 115 years and will

Olympics   Florian Bouhier   Close to the Porte de la Chapelle Arena, the Olympic Aquatic Centre is one of the facilities expressly built for the 2024 Olympic and Palalympic Games in Paris. A work of the firms VenhoevenCS and Ateliers 2/3/4, this building in the city of Saint-De

Jorge Bustos   Spain has won the Euro 2024 and England hasn’t, and we are thrilled. Mariano Rajoy, stoic philosopher, was right: in football and in life, it does no good to be a killjoy. His precursor, Seneca, spoke of the absurdity of protracted pessimism, whateve

After three years of renovations, the Grand Palais will host the fencing and taekwondo competitions during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Built for the 1900 Universal Exposition, the Grand Palais has been closed since March 2021 for renovations, led b

The Japan News   The Kagawa gymnasium, which resembles a traditional Japanese ship, opened in 1964. It was shut in 2014 due to problems with its structure not being earthquake-resistant as well as its low ceilings, which made it unsuited for use in some sports compet

Among all the Latin expressions that keep giving form to our languages, there is one in particular that has not lost an iota of applicability: panem et circenses. Coined by the poet Juvenal in referring to the peculiar political system of ancient Rom

Among all the Latin expressions that keep giving form to our languages, there is one in particular that has not lost an iota of applicability: panem et circenses. Coined by the poet Juvenal in referring to the peculiar political system of ancient Rom

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Play is something serious. The Neoplatonists used the oxymorons serio ludere and iocare serio to refer to a light way of dealing with matters of importance, in the Socratic tradition of seeking truth through dialogue. In the contemporary world, game

The Guardian   Rowan Moore   The world’s first multilevel skatepark could easily have come across as architectural dad-dancing, but it’s just right for its target audience F51 bills itself as the world’s first multilevel skatepark, a place where skaters, cyclists, scooters, roll

The dynamism that is associated with the use of horizontal bands in buildings, as well as with skating as a sport, is the gist of the scheme that has made Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano the winners of the competition to enlarge a high-performan

For the headquarters of the sports equipment and accessories manufacturer Amaya Sport in Noain (Navarre), the architect Josean Ruiz Esquiroz – who works from offices in Madrid and Gorraiz – reused ten shipping containers as structural pieces while st

The Guardian   Rowan Moore   In a departure from the gothic image of English private schools, Brighton College’s new building, designed by OMA, is an expression of global ambition. Think of an English private school and you will probably think of somewhere gothic. Something like

Not without some controversy in France and Spain alike (from his stand in El País, Fernando Savater – a big fan of the turf world – expressed his nostalgia for the old building), the renovated Longchamp Racecourse was recently completed. Long a

Japan’s leading independent architectural practice, Nikken Sekkei, in collaboration with the local firm Joan Pascual i Ramon Ausió Arquitectes, has won the competition for the new arena of Futbol Club Barcelona, which will maintain the structure of C

Shortly before the University of Mexico pinned on him the Attolini Medal, the Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza received this year’s COAM Award for the Sports Center of Francisco de Vitoria University in Pozuelo de Alarcón, in Madrid. It is an i

Ours is not a time of rationality, but a time of feelings. And this holds true not only in politics; it has a more popular and visible version in sports. While Barça prides itself on being “more than a club,” other clubs invoke other things, though p

Among the new quarries that Spanish architects are looking to for the obtainment of new commissions, Africa is still the least exploited. Because of this, the success that some pioneering firms have garnered there is newsworthy and cause for celebrat

Jesús San Vicente   The oldest stadium known about was the one at Olympia, venue of the first Olympic Games of history, held in the year 776 BC. In Rome, the most important one was the Coliseum (or Flavian Amphitheater), where gladiators were torn apart by beasts. In 80

In the wake of the shelving of Zaha Hadid’s project, the Japan Sports Council organized a second competition for the design of the new Tokyo National Olympic Stadium in the Shinjuku ward of the capital, and the winner was the Japanese architect Kengo

The Swiss partnership Herzog & de Meuron has been commissioned to build the new stadium of London’s Chelsea Football Club. The sport facility, which is to replace the current Stamford Bridge Stadium on the same spot in the British capital, will h

The design of the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid for the New National Stadium in Tokyo was one of the strong points of the Japanese capital’s bid to host the Olympic Games of the year 2020, which it won over Istanbul and Madrid. But two years lat

Few architectural types have evolved as little, in the course of history, as stadiums have. When certain sporting activities began to become mass phenomena early in the 20th century, the answer was to erect buildings which to a great extent were simp

Together with the automobile, the airplane, and the zeppelin, the ship was a mechanical dream of the modern architects, who envisioned in its forms the expression of a refined and graceful functionality, and also of the generation following them, whi