E-raamat: Architecture of the Playing Field: Shaping Space in Sport

"The author argues that sports and architecture share many concerns, as both center "the interplay of settings and bodies in motion." He sets out to study their conceptual and physical intersection, and to show what the aesthetics and spatial relationships of playing fields can tell us about sports and the cultures that create them. Cleary's scholarly background and personal experience as a fencer and soccer referee led him to the questions that drive this project. In this relatively brief meditation on physical space in sports, he argues convincingly "that related inquiries in one domain can inspire new readings in others while respecting the unique qualities of each. The Sports Center fan, the architecture enthusiast, and the balletomane have more to discuss than they may think." The subjects of Cleary's intriguing "new readings" range widely, from the translucent courts of the 2019 Women's World Squash Championships, to the introduction of the three-point line in basketball, to the similarities between Dutch architects' and Dutch soccer's emphasis on flexibility and multivalence"--

A novel exploration of playing fields as aesthetic and architectural spaces that frame athletes’ creativity and spectators’ evolving experiences of sport.

The playing field is more than an arena for sporting rivalry. It is a laboratory of invention, where athletes and coaches create new uses for the human body in response to the constraints and affordances of space. Indeed, Richard Cleary argues that, from translucent squash courts to the NBA three-point line to the city streets used by skateboarders, all sports have embedded spatial relationships that are also charged with social significance.

The Architecture of the Playing Field explores the aesthetic and physical experiences of the grounds on which we compete. Cleary digs into the perspectives of spectators, athletes, coaches, and umpires—perspectives that have changed along with the shifting configuration and mediation of the field, from early live sports coverage to today’s TV broadcasts overlaid with high-tech graphics and observed from every angle. Cleary shows how rules governing the size, shape, and divisions of the field reflect sports’ entwinement with societies at large, in particular the politics of race and gender. Mindful as well that some sports resist containment, he analyzes the disruptive use of space by snowboarders and parkour athletes. The Architecture of the Playing Field sensitizes us to the interplay of settings and bodies in motion fundamental to the power of sport.