Spaceship Football
October 28, 2013
INSPIRED by the hideousness of the design for the new Atlanta Falcons billion-dollar football stadium, Sage McLaughlin at What’s Wrong with the World reflects on the ugliness of public rituals. He writes:
Though long an enthusiast of organized sports, I just cannot imagine what would attract a person whose only knowledge of the subject was this artist’s rendering to take part in anything that happened in that building.
The incessant braying of our loud, vain, ugly public rituals signifies terminal decay. Now having been inured to it, there is next to no offense against beauty and dignified public order that will not find its defenders, all the more if it is packaged as entertainment. Spectacles of apocalyptic violence and destruction are more popular than ever.
— Comments —
Mike writes:
I have to say that I don’t understand the argument against the Atlanta Falcon’s proposed stadium. It’s an unconventional design, but I don’t necessarily see the connection between unconventionality and the idea that western civilization is in “terminal decay.” One or the other or both may be true, but where is the evidence of causality? Without wanting to go too far afield, I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue that progress lies in appropriate use of unconventionality.
Going back a few posts to “Into the Dustbin of Modern Art’, I have similar questions on the London footbridge. Some of the art on the page looks, to me, like trash, but the footbridge doesn’t. What bothers me more about the footbridge is that the builders didn’t see the resonance problems ahead of time. That’s a safety concern, as shown by the Tacoma Narrows bridge when it collapsed in 1940.
Laura writes:
The Falcons stadium is “unconventional?” Really? It seems very conventional for modern football stadiums which are generally austere geometric spaceships with un-ornamented walls of concrete or glass and exposed steel girders. Take the stadium for the Dallas Cowboys:
The neighborhoods in the vicinity of these stadiums are generally depressing because the behemoth dwarfs and sterilizes all. They’re inhuman. Who would want to live next to one of these things? They’re feats of engineering and technical gimmickry, but not artistically beautiful. They’re sold to the public by architectural hucksters, eager to assert their power over the human environment. As Mark Anthony Signorelli and Nikos Salingaros wrote: “[C]ontemporary prize-winning architects slavishly copy the same industrial aesthetic originally approved by the Bauhaus, whose members were working for the German industry to sell the industrial products of that time: steel, plate glass, and concrete. Those buildings perform terribly in all climates and are dysfunctional for most human activities inside and in their immediate external vicinity, yet so-called “starchitects” continue to emulate the rules embodied in those failed examples.”
In contrast, the Colosseum in Rome, which I believe held some 60,000 people, is not a depressing building, as big as it is, because its surfaces are ornamented and broken down into harmonious parts, nor is Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania, obviously inspired by the classical arena, as hostile to its environment as the new stadiums.
As for the Millennium Bridge, it suffers from the same industrial aesthetic. The piers are ugly.
