WEEKEND COLUMNISTS When Rod Sheard began building sports stadiums in the 1970s, somebody said to him: “You’re an architect who works on stadiums? I thought that was an engineering thing. What do you need an architect for?”
Sports architects get more respect now. In fact, their reputation may be at its highest point in the 2,600-year history of sports grounds. On March 30 the New Yorker, house magazine of the US cultural elite, put two new stadiums on its cover. Both New York baseball grounds were designed by Populous, the architectural firm where Mr Sheard is now senior principal. So were many of the world’s recent big stadiums. Populous’s babies include Sydney’s Olympic stadium, Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, much of Wembley, the forthcoming London Olympic stadium, and the roof over Wimbledon’s centre court that goes live on Monday when the tennis championships begin. A recent wet Sunday at Wimbledon was the perfect chance to ask Mr Sheard where stadiums are now.
He sat in a poky office full of chairs – “overfurnished room”, he grumbled – and held forth in a largely undimmed Australian accent. Fame and riches came late for the lanky, cheerful Queenslander. He reflects: “I think the turning point was about the mid-nineties, when we did the Huddersfield stadium. It won an RIBA award [from the Royal Institute of British Architects] and I was amazed when I found out that no stadium of any description had ever won any design award, ever.”
Before then, says Mr Sheard, “you pushed stadiums to the outside of your city. You surrounded them with car parks. They were considered bad-neighbour buildings, the kind you didn’t really want to integrate into the city.”
The return of stadiums to city centres is the first great change Mr Sheard identifies. If a stadium can attract 1m visitors a year, he argues, it is the perfect building to regenerate a neighbourhood. “Often some city has aspirations of building a new stadium and they say: ‘Well, where should we put it?’ Our answer is always: ‘You put a pin in the very centre of your city and get as close to it as you possibly can.’”
The second change is less obvious. Mr Sheard says: “Inside watching the game, it superficially is exactly the same. It’s probably where the greatest changes have taken place, but you can’t see them.” The new money that is even now flowing into sports, combined with new technology, has transformed spectating. “Before it was a bit pot luck,” admits Mr Sheard. “Sightlines were a bit crude. These days computers can calculate these things to a fine degree: how you get in and out, how the queues occur, how comfortable your seat is.”
It means stadium architects must pull off a trick: give fans in the new Yankee or Wembley Stadium an unparalleled experience and yet make them feel that these historic sites are unchanged. For example, says Mr Sheard: “Wimbledon had a precious atmosphere. We were about to rip the whole thing apart, and put it back together again, and try to retain that atmosphere.”
On centre court the afternoon we spoke, it feels as if Populous has retained it. Even if the royal box contains an Australian sports architect, the court remains recognisably the place that Captain Stanley Peach built in 1922. In fact, for all the fuss, stadiums have changed little over time. Ten years ago Mr Sheard predicted that every spectator would have a screen by his seat streaming stats and replays. He laughs wryly: “Right. And then the mobile phone came along.” Fans now carry their screens with them.
The stadium remains what it always was: a place to be gathered in intensity with others. Mr Sheard muses that if any ancient Roman regulars from the Coliseum somehow showed up at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, they would adapt easily: “It would take them a while to learn the rules, but they’d be alright.” That the new stadium should be a city-centre landmark would strike the Romans as blindingly obvious.
