Structures for sport, past, present and future

MAXXI Architettura Archives Centre – admittance free subject to availability of places

A seminar discussing the functioning of sports facilities and the engineering-architectural challenges they entail.

The stadia and constructions for sport in general represent a highly specialised synthesis of technical-scientific and compositional-architectural thinking: from the need for large spans for the roofs, which requires accurate and fundamental scientific-structural as wells as constructional thinking, to the distributional demands – for example for the large number of spectators – which require accurate compositional-social analysis, through to the hugely important symbolic dimension that such structures take on, above all when associated with events on an international scale, as with the Olympics.

These engineering-architectural challenges have led to the invention of true “structural machines”: engineering systems capable of moulding and controlling the forces of nature (gravity, wind, snow, seismic events) and subjecting them to the specific functional and symbolic demands in question. Thus were born the roofs of the Olympic Stadium, the Stadio delle Alpi, the Juventus Stadium, the Braga Stadium and many others. In this seminar the intimate functioning of a number of these structures will be discussed, revealing their secrets and shedding light on their deepest meanings.

Speakers
Massimo Majowiecki engineer, professor at the University of Bologna and IUAV in Venice
Tomaso Trombetti engineer, professor in the “Aldo Rossi” Faculty of Architecture of the University of Bologna
Micaela Antonucci Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, curator of the exhibition Pier Luigi Nervi. Architecture for Sport