ABSTRACT
Sport does not require architecture. A field can serve as the grounds for footraces, ball games, and other modes of sporting activity. Early football games in England famously, or perhaps notoriously, took place without fixed dimensions and across the townscape. Swimming, boating, surfing all can take place in natural, undesigned sites. The exterior wall of a building can be the backboard for handball or tennis. Nevertheless, the architecture of sport stretches back through history to the earliest exemplars of built forms. This is notable for both sporting and architectural reasons. In order to design and build sport architecture, there must already be in place some degree of codification of the rules of the game to be played and the minimum spatial dimensions necessary to undertake that activity. Thus the precursor of our modern stadia, the stadion, was both the place where a footrace was run and a unit of measurement. Sport architecture therefore emerges at the intersection of the codification of the rules of various games and means and mode of design and construction.
