Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T14:58:27.173Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction: sports stadia and modern urbanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

NIKOLAUS KATZER
NIKOLAUS KATZER*
Affiliation:
Helmut-Schmidt-University, Universität der Bundeswehr, Hamburg, Holstenhofweg, 22403 Hamburg, Germany
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Despite the fact that sporting spaces reflect key shifts in thinking about town planning, sports architecture is still an underexplored area in the historiography of urban design. The architects, engineers and designers attempting to regenerate and rejuvenate cities after World War II were aware of the popular interest in competitive sports. Stadia and landscape design were intended to help erase the negative urban images of nationalism and totalitarianism. By starting a dialogue with the past, town planners questioned the grandeur and monumentalism prevalent in architecture since the late nineteenth century. They sought to rediscover and redefine the modern.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , August 2010 , pp. 249 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Wharton, A.J., Building the Cold War. Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar.

2 Bale, J., ‘Introduction’, in Bale, J. and Moen, O. (eds.), The Stadium and the City (Keele, 1995), 11–20Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Crowley, D. and Reid, S.E. (eds.), Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford, 2002), 4–5Google Scholar; Stokes, R., ‘In search of the socialist artefact: technology and ideology in East Germany, 1945–1962’, German History, 15 (1997), 221–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), 59Google Scholar.

5 Relph, E., The Modern Urban Landscape (Baltimore, 1987), 8–10Google Scholar.

6 Kotsonis, Y., ‘Introduction: a modern paradox – subject and citizen in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia’, in Hoffmann, D.L., Kotsonis, Y. (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (London, 2000), 2Google Scholar.