ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses why sporting venues have attracted the attention of starchitects and why clubs are willing to pay top dollar for their services. Of the 38 architects who have been awarded the Pritzker Prize, 13 have completed major works of sport architecture. Many have significant unbuilt stadia projects as well–including Zaha Hadid’s rejected New National Stadium for Japan, and Peter Eisenman’s design for a new football stadium for Deportivo La Coruna. Sports stadia have come to be represented not just as the premiere emblems of American civic culture but as drivers of urban economic revitalization. Clad in sanded aluminum, the sports center hardly reads from the street as a gym, and it adds an element of visual interest in an otherwise modest urban landscape. Eduardo Souto de Moura, designer of the Braga Stadium, is also behind the far more modest Sport and Culture Center of Viana do Castelo, also in Portugal.
