The World Games’ main stadium, which will be unveiled at an opening ceremony in Taiwan today, is "not only magnetic architecture, it is also a remarkably humane environment, something you rarely find in a structure of this size,” according to architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff of the N.Y. TIMES. The stadium, designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, “resembles a python just beginning to coil around its prey, its tail tapering off to frame one side of an entry plaza.” Unlike the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, “it unfolds slowly to the visitor and is as much about connecting -- physically and metaphorically -- with the public spaces around it as it is about the intensity of a self-contained event.” The facility has more than 40,000 seats and is surrounded by “a vast new public park.” Visitors coming from downtown “walk down a broad boulevard before turning into the plaza,” and from there “the stadium’s tail, which houses ticket windows and restaurants, guides them toward the entry gates.” Once inside the stadium, a "sloping patch of lawn” looks over the field, and Ito “imagines that during many events the lawn will be open to the public, letting visitors drift in and out without buying a ticket.” Ouroussoff notes the building is similar in “degrees of openness and enclosure” to Herzog & de Meuron’s '05 Munich soccer stadium and Eduardo Souto de Moura’s '04 stadium in Braga, Portugal. These architects' “aim was to expand architecture’s emotional possibilities and, in doing so, to make room for a wider range of human experience.” Ouroussoff: “Ito’s stadium is the next step on that evolutionary chain” ( N.Y. TIMES, 7/16 ).
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| New World Games Stadium Has More Than 40,000 Seats, Surrounded By Public Park |
