bbc - culture - what happens to abandoned stadiums

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| 31 July 2014

What happens to abandoned stadiums?CRETE IDEAS (HTTP://WWW.BBC.COM/CULTURE/COLUMNS/CONCRETE-IDEAS)

y Images)

ev ents like the World Cup or Olympics, massive sports arenas are ofte n abandoned. But they can berposed to bene fit society, Jonathan Glancey argues.

n Olympic arenas, World Cup st adiums and other costly sporting venues close at the end of the colourful events for h they were designed, what happens to them? Many go on to host local spo rts clubs. Others, though, becomeerbial white elephants, scraping by as glorified parking lots, dirt tracks for stock-car racing and even, as in the caseontreals spectacular Olympic Stadium, as a swine-flu vaccination centre.

uth, such big buildings the size of entire city blocks or larger can be almost anything that the imagination,tural limitations, money, political will and planning laws allow. Even so, it is remarkable how many remain empty.e making a film in 1999 about the worlds Great Exhibitio ns, I was amazed to find the long-abandoned halls of

dons 1908 Franco-British exhibition, host to part of that years Olympics, on the site of what is a Westfield shoppingtoday. What had become giant pigeon nests were ghostly remnants of what, nearly a century earlier, had been afairy tale realm called White City.

tecture (http://www.bbc.com/culture/tags/architecture) Design (http://www.bbc.com/culture/tags/design)

cs (http://www.bbc.com/culture/tags/politics)

onathan Glancey
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w over the Franco-British Exhibition at White City, Shepherds Bush, London, 1908 (Getty)summer, the spotlight has been on the World Cup stadiums in Brazil, a country where there is said to be a shortageore than five million homes although many more millions of Brazilian reals have been spent on expensive venues like

Arena de Amaznia in Manaus and the Arena das Dunas in Natal. Host to just four World Cup matches, the ambitious00-seat Manaus stadium is destined to become home to the local fourth-division football team that attracts crowds of more than a thousand per game. One Brazilian judge has suggested it should be turned into a prison.

Arena das Dunas is similarly challenged, and even the new $900m Estadio Nacional in Braslia, which hosted sevenhes this summer, is destined to serve fourth division teams. It will have to wait until the 2016 Olympics to fill so many72,000 seats again.

m spectacle to serviceis why two young French architects, Axel de Stampa and Sylvain Macaux, have published colourful proposals for they call Casa Futebol. They suggest slotting low-cost housing units, rather like freight containers with pictureows, into tiers of World Cup stadiums. Varying in size between 50 and 150 sqm (538 to 1,614 sq ft), up to 350 of could fit into the Estadio Nacional leaving plenty of seats for those attending games and other events. The idea ismulate debate about what to do with these giant Brazilian venues in the face of poverty and an acute housingage.

Casa Futebol proposal for converting the Estadio Nacional, Brasilia, into public housing (Axel de Stampa and Sylvain Macaux/Tomasni)French architects might have gone further, and suggested shops, a clinic, a nursery and other commercial and civicities. Well, why not? These would certainly bring life, money and colour to these white elephants. In any case, thehas been tried out successfully in North America. Last summer, residents moved in to apartments built into thendant Bush Stadium in Indianapolis. The Art Deco stadium, opened in 1931 as home to the Indians basketball team,d in 1997. Used as a speedway dirt track for a couple of years, it was a storage depot between 2008 and 2011 for

ars dumped during the US governments $3bn Cash for Clunkers programme aimed at getting Americans to trade


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d gas-guzzlers before being bought by a local developer and transformed into new homes by Heartland Designtects. It retains much of the appearance of a stadium, including its cinematic entrance, and sports a green space for ents to look out on.

roposed individual housing units in a Casa Futebol s tadium project (Axel de Stampa and Sylvain Macaux/Tomas Faquini)eye-catching Pyramid Arena in Memphis, Tennessee, dating from 1991 and redundant since 2004, might have madeod housing project, too. This remarkable stadium, designed in the guise of, yes, a 98m-high pyramid, by the Atlanta-

d architect-engineers Rosser Fabrap for the Memphis Grizzlies and University of Memphis mens basketball teams is,ver, being converted into a Bass Pro megastore specialising in hunting, fishing and outdoors gear. There will also beoting and an archery range along with a 16-lane bowling alley, a high-level observation deck and a branch of Uncle

ks Fishbowl and Grill restaurant.e arenas have closed because the sport they were built for has lost favour or even been banned. This is the case of Arenas, a former bullring in Barcelona. Designed in a Moorish style and opened in 1900, Las Arenas played host tosands of fights between bulls and such famous matadors as El Cordobes and Dominguin, one time lover of theywood star Ava Gardner, before it gave up the ghost, and gore, in 1997. In 2011, the year after Catalonia abolishedfighting, Las Arenas reopened as a shopping mall. The architect was Richard Rogers, best known for the Pompidoure, Paris, and for the colourful new terminal at Madrids Barajas airport. With its rooftop walkway, atrium cafes andgner shops, Las Arenas is perhaps even more popular than it was in the day of Dominguin and El Cordobes. Thismer, the Emir of Qatar said he is willing to spend 2.2bn converting another redundant Barcelona bullring, Laumental, into Europes biggest mosque complete with a 300m minaret.

Montreal Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Summer Games (Getty Images)s era of fervid global consumption, however, ever more ailing sports arenas are likely to become shopping malls.e this is not the most imaginative use they can be put to, it is a profitable one. And, yet, looking at such epic follies astreals Olympic Stadium, designed by the French architect Roger Taillibert in a heroic Organic Modern style complete

a 175m sloping tower incorporating a funicular cable railway, wouldnt it be good to see such a bravura design


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ured into a city of the future, complete with ultra-modern homes and other showcases of the very latest science andnology? Of course, with so much space to play with, there would still be room inside for at least a modernist iceey pitch, a basketball court and a public swimming pool, if not a 70,000-seat World Cup football arena.u would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our

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bbc - culture - what happens to abandoned stadiums

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