A football stadium is a large “object” with an infrastructural character; a huge structure, imposing in scale, that serves a specific purpose. The objective should be to make it more like a building. By this we mean more urban, more attentive to what goes on around it. Only if it is in the middle of nothing can it ignore the surroundings. But in this case, in the outskirts of Zaragoza, there are connections with the city, constructions of diverse uses. An urban structure exists. It is up to the large plinth to do the job of adapting the object—the actual stadium, the bowl—to the city. The plinth absorbs all the complexity, both programmatic and functional, that a stadium accumulates. As the most civic part of the building, the plinth acts as a nexus between its urban, more human, more graspable scale on one hand, and its larger, more distant structural scale. The plinth becomes an urban façade with possible commercial or institutional uses incorporated in it, but it also turns into ramps and planes for people entering the stadium en masse, and it absorbs the grade differences existing in the lot. More complementary than contradictory to this focus on the plinth’s role in urban adaptation—a very common recourse in the history of large architectures endowed with the capacity to signify and symbolize—is the project’s recognition of the fact that football stadium nowadays have the capacity to represent and qualify a given zone. The stadium itself, the clear-cut bowl, in formal expression much lighter that the plinth it sits on, will appear in the distant horizon but also in urban proximity as an exponent of intentions to create architectural meaning........more
