STADIUM'SCAPES. La generazione degli stadi-paesaggio del nuovo millennio

Per quanto le dinamiche da coniugare all’interno della progettazione di un impianto sportivo altamente iconico quale è lo stadio siano numerose, delicate e dipendenti da molteplici fattori, tra questi ultimi il paesaggio – o meglio il rapporto che si instaura tra una macro-struttura di questo tipo e la morfologia del territorio che la ospita – è una variabile imprescindibile affinché l’edificio non risulti un organismo autoreferenziato ed estraneo all’ambiente in cui viene inserito, ma piuttosto gli si raccordi in maniera consapevole e organica, promuovendo le dinamiche di fruizione e il valore del territorio stesso, nel suo far convivere artificio e natura. Lo stadio-paesaggio diviene quindi strumento e occasione di riorganizzazione spaziale, nodo strategico di complesse operazioni di trasformazione dei paesaggi contemporanei.

Stadium’scapes may be considered one of the latest coined neologisms containing the word ‘scape as its conceptual and semantic root, coming from the Anglo-Saxon term Landscape. The word Landscape has recently been the focus of many passionate debates in different contemporary cultural sectors, as one of the chosen concepts for theoretical speculation. We would like to suggest the replacement of ‘scape with the word stadium as a symbol of the new millenium pop and hyper-technological culture. Contemporary stadium is a symbolic essence growning in shape and substance in architectural “out-scale”, repeated and cloned a million times thanks to the mass-media effect; on the contrary the item-stadium can preserve a deep “territory” symbolic meaning. New contemporary arenas are the result of a new vision of society and its “public” spaces; these “macro-buildings” are defined as real infrastuctureobjects perfectly combined with the landscape. Technologies and innovative materials combined with a renewed sensibility for green-environmental aspects; pseudo-systematic architectonic morphologies conversing with the surrounding landscape, as elements of territory rearrangement, not of critical discontinuity; design-objects changing their skin into sensitive optical elements and variable appearance, which you can sense beyond the product's substance; new and complex relationships with the paying public (customers are different and anyway not only supporters), attracted by the stadiums’ “oniric symbolism”. These are only some of the paradigms underlying stadium’scapes, which are now part of contemporary urban dictionary. Stadium’scapes may be considered as elements of thickening social development, in the technological and media areas: these parameters influence the planning development and they are really distinguishable in the final building image.