Irisarri + Piñera   Spain   The brief of the competition called in January 2018 defined the masterplan for the sports city of the Real Club Celta de Vigo. The complex had to harbor both an undefined and open program – with the ambition of gathering all the elements that shape o

MACH IDEA   Czech Republic   The Spanish firms MACH (Laia Gelonch Llongarrium, Marc Subirana Ribera) + IDEA (Carlos Maristany Ortiz, Luis Bellera Fernández de la Cruz, Eduardo Palao Valverde) have placed first in the competition for new sport facilities in Žatec, a town in the L

Fenwick Iribarren Architects   Qatar   Since their invention and standardization in the mid-20th century, metallic containers have optimized shipping transportation, ushering in a new era of global logistics and commercial exchange. Later on, new approaches to architectural seriation and

Natura Futura Arquitectura   Ecuador   María and Carlos, the owners of a small fitness center in the urban center of Babahoy, the capital of Los Ríos province in Ecuador, decided to turn part of their current home into a large space for physical exercise and social interaction. The resour

David Chipperfield Arup Associates   Italy   Part of a whole revamp of Santa Giulia – a former industrial zone located a few kilometers from downtown Milan – based on a masterplan drawn up by Foster+Partners, this new stadium for sport and culture events was designed by David Chipperfield Archi

Populous   Italy   The football clubs Inter Milan and AC Milan have announced that Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, commonly known as the San Siro, will be replaced by a stadium designed by Populous. Named ‘The Cathedral,’ the design draws inspiration from two of Milan’s major

El Equipo Mazzanti   Colombia   The project is located in altos de Cazucá, a neighborhood in the municipality of Soacha, a peripheral conurbation of the city of Bogotá. Socioeconomically it is a highly depressed area, lacking public infrastructure of any nature. It is notorious for

estudioHerreros   Panama   Two interventions shape new urban spaces in two Panamanian cities. Firstly, the ‘Corredor Urbano’ (urban highway) threatened to isolate the more modest districts of the city of Colón, so the project occupies the leftover sites around the intersection

Fenwick Iribarren Architects Serrano Suñer Arquitectura   Spain   In 2012, the project for the Madrid Convention Center, set to become part of the Cuatro Torres Business Area, was put on hold. After three years of construction work, the stalled project left a huge urban void where earthwork, foundation laying, and

Snøhetta   Norway   Inspirado en la instalación portuaria construida en 1937 por el arquitecto Ketil Ugland para la ciudad noruega de Arendal, cerrada diez años después y posteriormente demolida, el proyecto de la firma Snøhetta es una reinterpretación de la antigua zon

Óscar Miguel Ares   Spain   In the comarca of Montes Torozos, amid wheat fields and by the river Bajoz, Castomonte in the province of Valladolid features a stretch of the Camino de Santiago pilgrim route that comes from Madrid, and has a census count of 309. Using its wind-powe

Abraham Castro Neira Carlos Alberto Pita Abad   Spain   The football stadium of A Gandareira sits at the edge of the urban center of Villa de Bandeira, in the municipality of Silleda, facing the rural landscape. Serving a local sports club and its school, the facility is designed to take in usual traffic,

Fenwick Iribarren Architects   Spain   Caleido starts out from three premises: to propose a new centrality north of Paseo de la Castellana, to connect the Cuatro Torres Business Area with its environment, and to give the city a large green space – over 33,000 m² – around the complex. The

NP2F   France   Inserting the sports program – playground, ice rink, squash court, golf pit, and fitness areas – in the spaces between the new buildings means transforming the weaknesses of the context into the strengths of the project...

NP2F   France   The old electric substation of district 19 is transformed into a hotel using and restructuring the existing building, and preserving the ground floor, the facade, and some structural elements. The rooftop becomes a sports area with city views...

NP2F   France   Located on l’Île-Saint-Denis, the project pays tribute to the island’s heritage by proposing a nautical base, with the River Seine as playground. The base’s ground level is made of in situ concrete and the rest of volume is clad with timber... 

NP2F   France   This facade-less building imitates the urban logic by superposing the exterior spaces as if they were town squares; and it has a minimum ecological impact because it heats only one third and does not include air extraction systems in the open areas..

Equipo 01 / Jesús San Vicente   Spain   The architect Jesús San Vicente, in collaboration with María Galán and Paula Gil de Bernabé, has placed first in the competition to build the heated swimming pools of Arenas de San Pedro, in Ávila province, within the sports complex annexed to the mu

Barceló Balanzó Arquitectes Gustau Gili Galfetti AIA Activitats Arquitectòniques   Spain   Given the huge volume of the functional program – three sports tracks – in regards to the reduced dimension of the plot and the high urban density in the area, an important part of the sports complex is partially buried. By working on the section of

MOS Architects   Mexico   Different linear elements configure the olympic area: paths, walls, corridors, a pavilion, athletic track... lines in motion that contrast with the mat-building in which small individual rooms are interspersed with communal spaces...

Dominique Perrault   France   Dominique Perrault Architecture (DPA) has won the competition to cover the tennis court named after the French champion Suzanne Lenglen at Stade Roland Garros, the complex that hosts the French Open. Over a concrete structure and the ensemble of stee

MAD Architects   China   The sports facilities blend into a public park whose design will attract citizens to practicing exercise. Facades disappear into the terrain, covered by greenery, and contours are engraved into the surface, some forming pedestrian pathways.

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   Taking in 60,000 spectators, the stadium rises within the orthogonal grid of the new Fengdong business district of Xi’an, the city that is hosting the 2023 championship of the Asian Football Confederation. With new civic spaces and facilities for spo

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

With the various grandstands put in place at the last minute, construction workers still gathering and packing up their tools, and lingering echoes of the all-year demonstrations against the US$15 billion investment on an event that a large number of

It is no easy task to urbanize the desert, but globalization has shown that nothing is impossible. The question is at what cost, although the various regimes of the Gulf do not seem to worry about it. For them, ‘development’ is simply ‘managed’, hid

Real Madrid finally has its icon. This time the club’s much-awaited new star is the stadium that after a long, two-phased competition full of twists and turns has been commissioned to the team formed by GMP Architekten, L-35, and Ribas & Ribas, perha

La propuesta de Zaha Hadid ha sido finalmente la seleccionada en el concurso para construir en Tokio el nuevo Estadio Nacional de Japón. Concebido con el lenguaje recurrente de su autora, el proyecto (abajo) ha sido preferido a los presentados por lo

Aunque el concurso todavía no se ha fallado, se conocen ya las cuatro propuestas para la reforma del Estadio Santiago Bernabéu, proyectadas por arquitectos que, habida cuenta del encargo, no podían ser sino ‘galácticos’.

La nómina de grandes estadios proyectados por GMP (Von Gerkan, Marg und Partner), iniciada con la reforma del olímpico de Berlín en 2004 (véase Arquitectura Viva 106) y engrosada con los de Ciudad del Cabo y Puerto Elizabeth para la Copa del Mundo de

El 5 de diciembre se presentó el proyecto para el nuevo estadio del Atlético de Madrid que, proyectado por los sevillanos Cruz y Ortiz, surgirá de la ampliación y mejora del actual estadio municipal de La Peineta. Los principales requerimientos de la

Esquiar desde la azotea hasta las pistas será posible en el nuevo complejo residencial y centro de ocio de Levi, situado en la región finlandesa de Kittilä, y diseñado por el estudio danés de Bjarke Ingels. El proyecto se organiza en torno a una plaz