Stadium, enclosure that combines broad space for athletic games and other exhibitions with large seating capacity for spectators. The name derives from the Greek unit of measurement, the stade, the distance covered in the original Greek footraces (about 600 feet [180 metres]). The course for the footrace in the ancient Olympic Games at Olympia was exactly a stade in length, and the word for the unit of measurement became transferred first to the footrace and then to the place in which the race was run. As a type of structure, the stadium played a significant role in 20th-century construction technology.
The first Greek stadiums were long and narrow, in the shape of a U or a horseshoe. They were sometimes cut into the side of a hill, as at Thebes, Epidaurus, and at Olympia, the site of the Olympic Games, which began there in the 8th century bce. The Greeks also built hippodrome stadiums similar in layout but broad enough to accommodate four-horse chariot races, a feature of the Olympic Games as early as the 7th century bce.
The design of the Greek stadium was taken over and improved upon by the Romans, who built two types of stadiums: the circus and the amphitheatre. The circus was the Roman version of the hippodrome, a long, narrow, U-shaped structure designed for chariot races. The largest, and doubtless the finest ever built, was the Circus Maximus in Rome. In contrast to the circus, the amphitheatre, one of the most characteristic of all Roman buildings, was oval or round in plan and was completely enclosed on all sides. Intended for gladiatorial contests, in which the precise dimensions of the field were of slight importance, the amphitheatre was designed to afford maximum seating capacity and optimum visual facility for spectators. The giant amphitheatre built in Rome in the 1st century ce is known as the Colosseum. After the fall of Rome, amphitheatres survived for some time until the decline of the cities themselves terminated the spectacles that they had held. Nearly two millennia passed before the form was revived; much smaller, usually temporary stands sufficed for such intervening spectatorial events as the knightly tournaments of the Middle Ages in Europe.
The renewal of large-scale spectator sports came about gradually in the 19th century with the growth of European cities and the revival of interest in athletic contests; symbolically, the great impetus for the design of modern stadiums came from the revival of Olympic competition in 1896.
The stadium for the first modern Olympiad in Athens was a reconstruction of the ancient marble stadium built by Herodes Atticus on the site of an even earlier stadium in Athens. The Olympics since that time have provided a major focal point for the development of the modern stadium concept. In each period since the first modern Olympiad, the host country has usually erected a permanent stadium to mark the event. The first stadium of the modern genre was constructed for the IV Olympiad in 1908 at Shepherd’s Bush in London. The stands were partly roofed, and the stadium seated more than 50,000 people. Other Olympic stadiums of architectural note that were built before World War II include those at Stockholm (1912), Colombes, outside Paris (1924), Amsterdam (1927), and Berlin (1936). The Helsinki stadium built for the XII Olympiad (1940), which was canceled by the outbreak of World War II, served as the site for the XV Olympiad in 1952.
Stadiums rivaling the size of those of ancient Rome were constructed in several cities in the first half of the 20th century, notably the vast Strahov Stadium, in Prague, which was completed in 1934 for the Sokol gymnastics exhibition and had a seating capacity of more than 240,000. Other stadiums built to accommodate in excess of 100,000 people include May Day Stadium, in P’yŏngyang, North Korea; Melbourne Cricket Ground, in Melbourne; Aztec Stadium, in Mexico City; Salt Lake Stadium, in Kolkata (Calcutta); and Michigan Stadium, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. These figures of course denote how many people can be “accommodated”; the official “seating” capacities may be considerably lower.
American football inspired a new type of stadium design, the elliptical bowl, first employed in the Yale Bowl at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1914, and repeated in several other stadiums, including the Rose Bowl and Michigan Stadium. Because the bowl is entirely unsuited to the other principal American sport, baseball, another type of American stadium has evolved for baseball, in which the aim is to supply maximum roofed-seating capacity to protect spectators from the sunlight. A notable pioneer in this trend was triple-tiered Yankee Stadium, New York, built in 1923 (demolished 2009–10).
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The shapes of stadiums have varied widely according to the variety of uses for which they were built. Some are rectangular with curved corners, whereas others are elliptical or U-shaped. The building of large stadiums in the 20th century has been greatly facilitated by the use of reinforced concrete; this material has made possible the construction of daring new designs that would previously have been impossible to sustain structurally.
A basic difficulty of the roofed stadium was the interference with visibility by the columns supporting the roof. Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles was the first tiered stadium to provide column-free views from all seats (1959), followed by Shea Stadium in New York, which added field seat sections that rotate around the stadium to permit conversion from a baseball to a football arrangement (1964; demolished 2008). Several other outstanding stadiums have been built for baseball, for example, Wrigley Field in Chicago (1914) and Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland (1992).
A significant development of the mid-20th century was the Astrodome, built in 1965 in Houston, Texas; this was the first major fully roofed stadium. Indoor stadiums of considerable size had been built previously, notably Madison Square Garden in New York City and Chicago Stadium in Chicago (both original structures have been demolished). For the 1960 Olympics in Rome, the leading Italian architect-engineer Pier Luigi Nervi created the Roman sports complex, which included the Palazzetto dello Sport with a ribbed-dome roof. The Astrodome, however, was, by comparison, gigantic, with a seating capacity of 62,000 people and a large playing field under a dome, of transparent plastic panels supported by a steel lattice, that spanned 642 feet (196 metres) and rose 208 feet (63 metres) above the playing field. Within a decade, however, the Astrodome was eclipsed by the New Orleans Superdome, which opened in 1975 with an official seating capacity of 69,065 (though able to accommodate larger numbers); the 30-story structure is topped by a steel-ribbed roof that has a 680-foot (200-metre) clearspan. In the late 1980s stadiums with retractable domes began to appear, most notably Toronto’s Rogers Centre (opened 1989).
An important development was the application of flexible steel cables to span large roof dimensions. Cables contributed significantly to speed of construction, to lightness of roof, and to economy of construction cost in covered stadiums. A modern stadium with this system was built in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, and called the Metrodome (opened 1982; demolished 2014). Such cable systems can span large distances; a concept for a 200,000-capacity, covered baseball stadium was developed by Lev Zetlin, an American engineer.
The concept of an enclosed stadium and the desire for greater capacities have led toward the search for improved materials and construction techniques. Modern technology, including that developed in the aerospace industry, already possesses techniques for covering spans of thousands of feet. Such is the potential of the modern stadium design concept that proposals to span all of Manhattan Island have been seriously discussed. It is by no means unrealistic to see today’s roofed stadiums, with their arrays of restaurants, exhibition halls, and other auxiliaries, as the forerunners of completely roofed, weather-controlled cities.