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

Manuel Cervantes Estudio   Mexico   La Pedrera is a general plan designed for the countryside of Mexico City. It includes spaces to celebrate all sorts of sports activities, such as horseriding or kitesurf, as a tribute to Greek olympic architecture and its palaestrae...

NP2F   France   Located at the entrance to the Brazza area of Bordeaux, this sports center has built area exceeding 15,700 square meters and rises 20 meters. The exterior spaces are superimposed like urban squares and streets protected against wind. The building’s m

Taller Héctor Barroso   Mexico   One of the open tournaments of the professional tennis circuit is held on premises where the facilities, presenting a simple wall of rammed earth, blend with the desert landscape. A series of platforms molds the terrain to form playing courts, which

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   The start of construction work on the Titlis Project in Engelberg, scheduled for completion in 2029, has been announced. In 2017, the firm Herzog & de Meuron was commissioned to renovate the Alpine resort of Titlis, located 3,000 meters above sea lev

Barkow Leibinger   Germany   Over the years since it opened in the late 1960s, the Trumpf machinery factory has grown and expanded to become a large industrial campus in the German city of Ditzingen, 15 kilometers from Stuttgart. It has already grown horizontally all it can, so

Boltshauser Architekten   Switzerland   The 20-meter-high building is subdivided into horizontal layers that respond to the stacked spatial program. Functionally, the building is structured in three main areas: the stacked ice rinks, the high diving and competition pools, and the leisure a

Taller de Arquitectura Miguel Montor   Mexico   This sports facility is part of the production complex of the Mexican tool manufacturer Truper, used by its employees and their families. There are no other constructions around, and the complex tries to keep its volumes as imperceptible as possible,

Rojo Fernández-Shaw   Spain   The Julia Powell Hall is a sports and multipurpose space on the campus of Runnymede College in Alcobendas, a municipality of the Madrid metropolitan area. The starting point of the project was taking advantage of the existing foundation: the basement

Snøhetta Werk Arkitekter   Denmark   In addition to promoting the practice of water activities and bringing different sports clubs into one building, the new facilities of a marina are meant to serve as a social hub for the locality.

Kéré Architecture   Uganda   The kamwokya informal settlement, located among the hills of Kampala’s central district, is one of the most indigent areas of the capital, with a high dwelling density, scarce infrastructures, and poor health conditions. Surprisingly, it hides the on

Zaha Hadid Architects   Denmark   The team formed by Zaha Hadid Architects, Sweco, and Tredje Natur has won the competition to build a new football stadium in Aarhus, Denmark. The current stadium, which opened in 1920, does not meet the standards required for it to host first-tier pr

E2A   Switzerland   The existing school complex was constructed by Hans von Meyenburg from 1954 to 1956. It is dispersed across the site in a loosely staggered parallel configuration. The project strategy is based on an analysis of the existing buildings, which are unde

Fenwick Iribarren Architects   Qatar   With its facade showing Islamic patterns and a form that makes one think of a garment commonly worn by young Qataris, the new sport arena oozes with vernacular culture. The rhombic pieces of fiberglass that form the facade and roof create translucent

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   Zaha Hadid Architects has won the competition to design the Hangzhou International Sports Centre. The scheme incorporates a 60,000-seat football stadium, a 19,000-seat indoor sports arena, and an aquatics center with two 50-meter pools. There are als

MAD Architects   China   The Beijing-based firm of Ma Yangson, MAD Architects, was commissioned to build the Quzhou Sports Park, a complex spanning almost 700,000 square meters, in the city of Zhejiang. Surrounded by trees, the facilities – including a swimming pool and a ho

IDOM   France   In Tarbes, a commune in the Occitanie region of France’s Hautes-Pyrénées department, the firm IDOM – directed by Inés López Taberna, Iñaki Garai and Gohar Manrique San Pedro – transformed a building used in the early 20th century for the military ind

Invisible Studio   United Kingdom   In the vegetable garden of The Newt – a hotel in Bruton, a town in the southwest English county of Somerset – stands this building by Invisible Studio. This is the third that the British architecture group founded by Piers Taylor has completed for th

Foster + Partners Norman Foster   Qatar   Lusail Stadium, centerpiece of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, officially opened on 9 September with the Lusail Super Cup final between the winners of the professional leagues of Saudi Arabia and Egypt – Al Hilal SFC and Zamalek, respectively. Designed by F

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   The stadium of Basel’s local football team, originally designed by Herzog & de Meuron and completed in 2002, will be renovated by the same Swiss firm. In the refurbishment project, photovoltaic panels replace the translucent bulging plastic eleme

MAIO Jorge Vidal   Spain   The triangular volume where multiple programs converged is replaced here with a Vierendeel beam-box, which allows opening up the main court – separated from the secondary one by a three-meter rigid box – to the urban space as a multipurpose indoor ha

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

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