“Stadium +”
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Receiver of The Blythe and Thom Mayne Undergraduate Thesis Prize, SCI-Arc, 2020
Montpelier, France
43°35’48.7”N 3°54’54.4”E
Undergraduate Thesis
Instructed By: Peter Testa & Kristy Balliet
Architectural Competition
In Collaboration with: Abel Maqueira
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Our thesis engages one of architecture’s foundational dichotomies: the building as anautonomous object versus the building as part of an urban configuration. To navigate throughthis dichotomy, our stadium tests the idea of a new urban morphology by shifting its role as the new urban generator to facilitate the growth of the city. Stadiums, typically known as iconswithin the city, are moving in a new direction of multi-use, the idea of the singular entity, thebowl in a field of parking, is outdated. Our project doesn't serve as a single-use building but iscomprised of multiple parts integrated with the rest of the site, producing an opportunity toreprogram the context as a new urban generator. Instead of waiting for the city to meet the site,our project grows to meet the city. The brief asks for an Olympic football stadium located on theoutskirts of Montpellier with post-event sustainability. This is a college town in the south ofFrance and the current growth of the city is expected to reach the site of the stadium in the next10-20 years, demanding an urban response. We are looking at parts, which allow us to addressthe project in a morphological approach where we interrogate the aspects of the stadium or thesingular object that make it rigid; which are in this case: the seating, the loop, the need forconstant continuity and closure.
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