When the World Games opened in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in July they did so in a stadium that may point the way forward for arena design.
Japanese architect Toyo Ito's breathtaking arena resembles a snake curled around the 50,000 seats, and as a statement of modernity is as striking as the Bird's Nest with which Beijing marked its Olympics last summer.
The Bird's Nest was intended to make a statement about China, and was the latest in a long tradition of Olympic arenas, starting with Berlin's neo-classical 1936 stadium, designed to impress the world with their scale and scope.
From that perspective the Bird's Nest succeeded, but in an era of recession and unprecedented environmental awareness, Kaohsiung's marvel could be the more influential.
The stadium roof is covered by 8,884 solar panels, the "scales" on the snake's back, which generate 100 per cent of its power. When the stadium is not in use the power is sold back to the local grid and can meet 80 per cent of the local area's energy needs.
Carbon-positive and built with sustainability in mind, the principles that underpin Ito's design could provide a blueprint for the UK as it contemplates a decade of hosting major sporting events and as leading football clubs, including Tottenham and Liverpool, plan new homes.
Few nations can resist trying to leave at least one iconic new arena from an event. In Portugal the Braga Stadium, hewn from a granite quarry, was the legacy of Euro 2004. In London, Zaha Hadid's Aquatic Centre is prematurely billed as iconic.
London 2012's main stadium is built on more sustainable principles, however, and could become the first recycled Olympic arena, with Chicago considering re-using part of it should it win the 2016 Games.
At its heart is a 25,000-seat bowl that will be the permanent legacy, with a further 60,000 temporary seats built for the Games. The temporary nature of the design means that much of the infrastructure, including toilet facilities and food outlets, is being housed outside the stadium in temporary 'pods'.
Dale Jennins, a principal at Populous, the leading architectural practice responsible for the Olympic Stadium as well as Wimbledon's Centre Court roof and the new Wembley, says that the demands of sustainability are changing the rules for arena design.
"I think it could be that the age of these huge, rather pompous stadiums is a thing of the past," he said. "That does not mean that we will not see great designs, of course. Sustainability in building design is going to create its own language and its own iconic buildings.
"We have gone beyond micro-generation such as you see with the Kaohsiung stadium and we're looking at 'embodied' energy too, that is the total amount of energy required to build the stadium and that will be used in its lifetime.
"Most stadiums are actually not used the bulk of the time. On average, in a 50-year life they are only used for about a year and a half, so one of the key things is to make them efficient, and to have multi-use arenas so that they work harder. The London 2012 stadium has a lower level of embodied energy than any previous Olympic stadium."
As well as designing smarter new buildings, Jennins points to clever re-use of existing arenas as evidence of the trend towards sustainable sports arenas. "At Wimbledon we retained 75 per cent of the original Centre Court. In Berlin the Olympic stadium was re-fitted brilliantly for the last World Cup." With a host of major events coming to the UK in the next 10 years we may see more of the same. "Architecturally speaking we do not have great stock of existing stadiums , but most of them are intrinsically sound and I think we will see them redeveloped for these events."
The days of the mega-stadium are not quite over. Later this month Paul McCartney will open the biggest arena in the world when he plays the inaugural concert at the $1 billion Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas. With a column-free roof span a quarter of a mile long, housing 3 million square feet of usable space it is a monument to the success and excess of American football's biggest brand. For stadium design, however, it looks like the exception rather than the rule.
(Source: Telegraph.co.uk)
