Rome of the Carolinas
By Peter Cook
Excerpted from the essay found in The Stadium: Architecture for the New Global Culture by Rod Sheard.

Sitting there in Rome -- and not just a craggy old monument -- the Colosseum still oozes action and power. Its form races round in space with that tricky -- but tempting -- ability to grab a 'dynamic' and transmit a sense of that grabbing over the two thousand years of its existence.

We don't just need to be prompted by Technicolor blockbusters with surround sound to remind us of what went on, because it's surely there in the stone and the serried arches that swish past us. the body of the building is, of course, the massive construct that held all those screaming onlookers. Its soul: the now silent field. No plaza, no stage, no altar, no dais -- can approach its aura of dramatic expectation. Yet the architecture is direct, the geometry is obvious, and the architectural rhetoric (despite all the heroism) is remarkably well under control.

The Pantheon (with inset of the magic eye)

The Pantheon, by contrast, has to resort to devices -- its magic eye is brilliantly cunning, of course, but nonetheless it is a contrivance.

So there, in a nutshell, is the basic challenge of architecture. How to deftly capture the magic? Especially when dealing with the challenge of the Event: the Game and the assembly are theatre. The body can somehow celebrate the sense of expectation -- at every stage from turnstile, cloakroom, bar, television room, players' tunnel, and even more so when these things intertwine and feed each other. Put a body of people queuing, hustling and rustling, and you have something infinitely more electric than a town of similar size to that crowd. ...

Another vagabond's memory, this time from South Carolina: after an hour's drive from the airport, through lush and well-tempered countryside, there was a sudden vision. Like Bluebeard's castle on acid, an enormous, beautiful thing loomed up out of the trees: not apparently surrounded by anything in particular. This, the stadium of Clemson (and its University which was there, somewhere under the trees) seemed to come out of a fairytale. It had class, it had guts and it certainly had presence, though oddly enough, I don't remember much about the architecture except, like the team, it felt GREAT.

Clemson Memorial Stadium

So we have the stadium as point of arrival, as point of focus, and in terms of urban theory: the point of departure. From a well-honed, well-sited, and (I would suggest) a well-infested event structure we can conjure up a wonderful 'town' of the 21st century.

In our day-to-day survival, we have moved into the world of the hybrid. We live in the reality of the folded-over experience, with fun-and-games as seriousness: one activity as a trigger for other activities, with a crowd rumbling through the turnstiles with a variety of needs or indulgences to be tapped. The best and most ingenious architects are celebrating and articulating the magic of the event -- with a giant arch or a sweeping curve; a slithering, moving canopy; a preying, gesticulating gangway or a striding leg or two on the go. Yet simultaneously they are beginning to incorporate witty combinations of activity; some circumstantial, some entrepreneurial and many 'inspired'.