Sean Burns
ARCH-4980.3 | Carla Leitao, Adjunct Professor
DEATH OF A STADIUM
SEAN BURNS
The thesis is interested in the architectural implications from projecting future conditions of athletic competition and sports events as cultural artifacts. The project creates a scenario where sport events can happen in any suitable condition, provided there are athletes, a field, pitch, or court, and fans. The strategy is to implement a framework that can capture any event and broadcast it to a variety of audiences, allowing sport to live within its bare condition: athletes or teams physically exerting and evolving their skills against each other.
The need for massive mega-stadiums may no longer exist in the future. Today, sport is broad-casted in a one directional feed. The proposal inquires on a strategy that would allow sports to have a true feedback loop which would make athletes aware of their performance, even if they are playing one-on-one basketball in Hillsview, South Dakota (population: 3).
The Death of a Stadium proposal attempts to refocus the gaze on the game, by removing the centralization of attention on stadium infrastructures, and allowing it to spontaneously occur at any field providing the measures that continue to engage the momentum of a game, and attract fans to participate either physically or virtually.
The goal is to create opportunities for sport to develop organically and attract top athletes and spectators to remote locations that otherwise would not have the opportunity to present itself as a location for competition with the existing sport stadium model. Maybe that idea can be seen more clearly through these two maps – one of the existing formal sports venues and then with the venues and locations in the future using existing infrastructure to expand the potential sports venues.