Often the designer of choice for mega events, David Rockwell imagines the ideal design of a stadium.

Rockwell's ideal stadium design emphasizes public spaces and community integration.Illustration and renderings courtesy the Rockwell Group

David Rockwell has spent most of his career engaged in the art of spectacle. (It is, not so coincidentally, the title of a book he coauthored with Bruce Mau.) Because of his long history creating restaurants, hotels, exhibitions, and stage sets—performance spaces of all types—we asked him to tackle a larger, but related, design problem: the stadium. How do you make these huge facilities more urban friendly? His solutions range from the deliberately speculative (a temporary water park on non-event days) to current best practices in stadium design. 

The Problem

“The problem is a pretty easy one to identify,” Rockwell says. “These mammoth buildings remain unused for most of the year. But cities derive a certain amount of civic pride from them, because they’re containers for these incredible rituals conducted on a massive scale. So the question becomes: How do we envision a stadium that provides a suitable platform for these big events, but can also become a part of the public realm when it’s not being used as a stadium?”

One of the off-season uses for the stadium include a gigantic water park for summer recreation.

Activate the Edges

“One of the first things we did was look at the existing infrastructure and land-use patterns of stadiums. Are there any ways to take advantage of that? You’ve already got circulation of the four quadrants. Those could easily lead to small, low-rise buildings—student housing, temporary work space, community and fitness centers—directly adjacent. The introduction of live/work space could activate the no-man’s-land around the stadium, by potentially triggering more residential development, restaurants, and retail shops nearby. You can also think about the field itself being flexible-—on non-game days it could be open to the public, as a park.”....Continue Reading

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