Jeffrey Kipnis

Like Minerva springing from the head of Jupiter a fully formed goddess clad in a suit of armor, the professional sports stadium was born a perfected building type. On the day that Emperor Titus opened the Colosseum almost two thousand years ago, the citizens of Rome found eighty numbered gates to facilitate entry and exit, 50,000 reserved seats separated into different prices based on the quality of view, an interior mall of food services, a retractable sun shade, and an extraordinary infrastructure of “backstage” facilities to serve the athletes and games. The Colosseum provided so excellent a prototype that nothing much has changed in the configuration of the stadium as such in two millennia. The few significant changes that have occurred trace to new technologies – from steel to loud speakers to Fieldturf – while the creative work of the architect remains limited to the stadium’s exterior. In fact, no other kind of building has so little evolved over the same course of time, suggesting that the professional sports stadium may rightly claim to be the first “building type”... [+]