The Antistadium: Dissolving the Sports Venue into a Public Landscape

What happens when you strip a stadium of its walls, its gates, its turnstiles, and let the landscape itself become the architecture? The Antistadium proposes exactly that: a sports venue that refuses to behave like one. Rather than erecting a sealed concrete bowl that sits dormant between match days, Louis Nicollin Park carves terraced seating directly into a rolling green topography, producing a public landscape that functions as a park first and a football ground second.

Designed by Gabriel Madrigal B and Federico Hernández, the project was recognized as an Editor's Choice Entry in the Staydium 2020 competition. The brief challenged participants to rethink the stadium typology, and this entry responds with a provocation: the most sustainable stadium might be one that barely looks like a stadium at all. By dissolving the boundary between sports infrastructure and urban parkland, the designers offer a model for cities seeking to reclaim the enormous footprints that conventional venues consume.

A Bowl Carved from Grass, Not Poured in Concrete

From above, the pitch sits at the center of concentric terraced rings that rise gently outward, their surfaces covered in grass rather than precast concrete. The effect is closer to a sculpted landform than a built structure. Spectators sit on the earth itself, gathered along contours that feel shaped by erosion rather than engineering. At dusk, a single illuminated grandstand along one edge of the pitch provides the only conventional piece of stadium furniture, its low horizontal profile reading more like a sheltered promenade than a towering tribune. The contrast is deliberate: one hard, lit element anchors the composition while the rest of the venue dissolves into the park.

Terraced Seating as Topography

Two axonometric drawings reveal how the terraced seating wraps around the football pitch in a continuous landform punctuated by scattered trees. The geometry is not symmetrical; one drawing shows the bowl intact, while the other captures the diagonal transition where terraced steps flatten into an open plaza. This shift is critical. It means the landscape does not dead-end at a perimeter wall. Instead, it grades smoothly into flat public ground where markets, gatherings, or simply walking through the park can happen without encountering a locked gate.

The trees planted across the terraces serve a dual purpose. On non-match days, they provide shade and ecological habitat, reinforcing the reading of the site as a park. During events, they frame informal viewing positions, allowing spectators to watch from beneath canopy cover rather than from rigid numbered seats. It is an inversion of the typical stadium logic, where nature is excluded from the spectator experience entirely.

Site Organization: Program Without Perimeter

The site plan confirms the overall strategy. The contoured seating bowl occupies the center, with adjacent facilities arranged along the edges without forming a continuous enclosure. There is no fortress ring of service corridors and corporate suites isolating the pitch from its surroundings. The park remains porous, accessible from multiple directions, reinforcing its identity as a civic amenity rather than a ticketed destination. Contour lines on the drawing read almost like a topographic survey, underscoring the ambition to treat the entire project as modified terrain rather than placed architecture.

Why This Project Matters

Stadiums are among the most resource-intensive building types cities produce, and their utilization rates are notoriously low. A venue used forty evenings a year spends the remaining three hundred and twenty-five as a fenced-off void. The Antistadium confronts this inefficiency head-on by proposing a landscape that never closes, never empties, and never requires the energy expenditure of a conventional enclosed arena. Its environmental case is built not on technological add-ons but on a fundamental reduction in material and operational demand.

Madrigal and Hernández demonstrate that rethinking a building type does not require abandoning its function. The pitch is still regulation size, the sightlines still work, and the grandstand still provides covered seating for those who want it. What changes is the relationship between the venue and the city around it. Louis Nicollin Park belongs to its neighborhood seven days a week, and to football only when the whistle blows. That shift in ownership, from event to everyday, is the real design move here.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Gabriel Madrigal B, Federico Hernández

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Project credits: The Antistadium: Louis Nicollin Park  by Gabriel Madrigal B, Federico Hernández Staydium 2020 (uni.xyz).