Stoenix: A Stadium That Sheds Its Walls to Become the City

Most stadiums are islands. They sit in seas of parking, animated for a few hours on game day and dormant the rest of the week. Stoenix takes the opposite stance: it imagines a stadium that has, in the designer's words, "rid itself of all burdens to realize its true potential as a central piece of the city's infrastructure." The result is a geodesic dome threaded with tram routes, cycling pathways, and pedestrian zones, where the act of watching a match is only one layer in a stack of civic programs that run continuously.

Designed by Maab Abdulrahman, Stoenix was selected as an Editor's Choice entry for Staydium 2020, a competition that challenged participants to rethink the stadium as an urban typology. Abdulrahman's proposal layers public spaces, commercial districts, and recreational areas into a single structure, arguing that a modern stadium should function as a socio-cultural hub rather than an isolated enclosure.

A Multi-Level Atrium Where the City Walks Through the Stadium

The interior atrium reveals the project's core ambition. Diagonal white structural bracing creates a lattice that is simultaneously load-bearing and spatial, framing views across multiple levels where pedestrians, cyclists, and scattered trees coexist. This is not a concourse designed to funnel crowds toward their seats; it is a fragment of city, complete with ground-level planting and generous sightlines. The juxtaposition with a historical engraving of a public square surrounded by buildings and gathered crowds is deliberate. Abdulrahman positions Stoenix within a lineage of civic gathering spaces, suggesting that the stadium's ancestry lies not in 20th-century concrete bowls but in the Roman forum and the Renaissance piazza.

The Bowl as Green Room: Daylight, Turf, and Tiered Seating

From the spectator's perspective, the playing field reads as a vivid green plane framed by tiered seating and open sky. The geodesic dome overhead is layered with adjustable panels that regulate natural light, letting the interior feel alive rather than sealed. This light-management strategy doubles as an energy play: by calibrating daylight admission, the design reduces the need for artificial illumination during daytime events. The accompanying site plan diagram maps the stadium's footprint against the surrounding infrastructure, making visible the tram connections, cycling paths, and pedestrian corridors that feed into the structure. Accessibility here is not an afterthought appended to a loading dock; it is the organizing logic of the plan.

Sectional Logic: A Dome That Contains an Entire District

The section drawing is where Stoenix's ambition becomes most legible. A lattice framework arcs over multiple interior program levels stacked beneath the dome: seating tiers, commercial zones, public walkways, and service infrastructure all occupy distinct bands within the same envelope. The triangulated roof structure visible from the stands in the corresponding interior view confirms that this lattice is not decoration. It distributes load across the dome while defining the spatial character of every seat in the house. Eco-friendly materials and modular design principles inform the structural system, allowing components to be adapted or replaced as the city's needs evolve over decades.

Layered Walkways and the Diagonal Grid

A second interior rendering reinforces the experience of moving through the stadium as a continuous urban promenade. Figures traverse layered walkways at different elevations, with the same diagonal structural bracing visible from the atrium views acting as a unifying motif. The repetition is intentional: it gives orientation in a complex, multi-level environment and produces a rhythm of light and shadow that changes as the sun tracks across the adjustable dome panels above. Classical architectural order, reinterpreted through a 21st-century structural vocabulary, keeps the vast interior legible and human-scaled.

Why This Project Matters

Stoenix matters because it refuses the premise that a stadium is a single-use building. By weaving transit, commerce, recreation, and sport into one geodesic envelope, Abdulrahman proposes a typology that earns its footprint every day of the week. The design does not merely add a café to a concourse and call it mixed-use; it restructures the section so that public life flows through the building at every level, with the playing field as one attraction among many.

For the broader discourse around sustainable stadium architecture, the project offers a useful provocation. Energy-efficient light regulation, modular construction, and multimodal transit integration are not radical ideas individually, but combining them into a coherent spatial narrative is harder than it looks. Stoenix demonstrates that the next generation of stadium design may not be about bigger roofs or flashier facades. It may be about dissolving the boundary between the stadium and the city until the two become, structurally and socially, the same thing.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Maab Abdulrahman

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Stoenix by Maab Abdulrahman Staydium 2020 (uni.xyz).