Sport landscapes represent fertile ground for design intervention throughout the built environment and across the planet. This nonetheless overlooked and lowly landscape represents a distinct opportunity in a world faced with mounting social and environmental challenges. Sports and sport landscapes consist of socio-spatial performances and environments which carry with them critical ramifications on conditions of place, ecology, and territory.
Using an analysis of cross-cultural sport landscapes over time as a point of departure, Fields of Play: (Re) Optimizing the Surface explores a retuning of the spatial control that characterizes these landscapes. In conversation with an emerging City of Vancouver ‘sport field strategy’ evaluating the production of synthetic playing surfaces, I defamiliarize our collective understanding of what these spaces and practices are and where they come from. The resulting design language informed a speculative landscape that challenges reigning spatial paradigms and instead optimizes for ecology and social connection but also reckons with issues of access, program, and site.
MIDFIELD / PLATFORM RENDER
FOUL LINE / WALL ISOMETRIC
KABBADI CIRCLE / INDIA ~1500 BCE
POLLICE VERSO, JEAN-LEON JEROME (1872) / SPACE OF EXCEPTION