Design
a stadium
Architectures and technologies for construction and land management
Emilio Faroldi, Davide Allegri, Pietro Chierici, Maria Pilar Vettori
Maggioli Publisher
Sant'Arcangelo di Romagna (RN)
2007
ABSTRACT
The evolutionary dynamic of the new city is oriented towards an effective dialogue with the existing environment and landscape, going beyond purely rhetorical values, adopting new lines of thought, objective and performance, such as the eco-compatibility and sustainability of interventions, combined with the concept of enhancing the value of material and virtual assets. These trends are sensitive to going beyond functional rules, interpreting morphological aspects in the light of both natural and artificial factors and variables, respecting socioeconomic, physical-environmental, cultural and settlement-related constraints. The updating of tools for governing and managing the territory at different scales, due to the emergence of new requirements, places the environmental issue at the centre of the debate, involving cultural geographies and sectors that until now were considered frontier sectors in an interdisciplinary logic. The new scenarios of architecture are affected by contaminations that change the approaches of established disciplines. The incipit of the safeguarding and protection of resources represents the nodal phenomenon of urban renewal, not only through conservative instances and the freezing of assets, but through the creation of new projects aimed at the valorisation of elements, artefacts and the landscape in its broadest sense. Within the processes of urban requalification and transformation of the territory, the football stadium, elevated to a multifunctional cultural infrastructure, makes it possible to investigate the relationship between the innovative factors of architectural production and the new organisational models for the management of large-scale projects, incorporating the themes of complexity, multidisciplinarity and interscalarity that fuel the current debate on the transformation of the territory, making use of the new scientific paradigms of technological design. Among the main themes of the emerging debate, that of competition between culturally homogeneous districts, inevitably connected to the search for new development tools, plays a characterising role in territorial requalification policies. The contemporary stadium constitutes an architectural model capable of producing services, competitiveness and innovation, representing an opportunity and a vehicle for social and economic content through the creation of opportunities and experiences of relationships. The comparison and integration with the cultural and territorial context, the technological, functional and managerial complexity of its components, make the "stadium" project evolve into a process articulated in parallel and multi-scalar phases, in which the themes of multi-functionality, flexibility and safety become the keys to interpreting the current strategies of building intervention on an urban scale, with a view to sustainable and socially integrated design. The stadium plays the role of social activator, capable of receiving and satisfying the needs and requirements expressed by society, strengthening the link with the reference community, increasing the perceived value and the satisfaction expected from the use of the facility itself. The work intends to investigate the new technological landscapes, analytically exploring the phases of design, construction and management of a process of redefinition of contexts and places of high complexity, in order to contribute to the action of spatial and social qualification underway. The territory constitutes the horizon with which the new multifunctional stadium is confronted, introducing opportunities and logic of physical, economic and social qualification and valorisation of a dynamically evolving reality: designing a stadium today means designing the territory together with one of its main cultural infrastructures.
