(RE) Optimizing the surface

fields of play

Berend Kessler

Fionn Byrne

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.