Sport Infrastructure. Origin, evolution, transformation

«For the first time in the history of humankind, at regular intervals and at fixed times, several millions of people sit down in front of their TV to watch and, in the fullest sense of the term, participate in the celebration of the same ritual».Marc Augé, 1982. The sport infrastructure represents an important opportunity for architectural, design and technological experimentation – highlighting its potential is the main goal of this essay. Exploring the paradigms of the design, construction and management of sport architecture by extracting their values in terms of innovation, multidisciplinary and inter-scalar approach, means pursuing an undoubtedly topical research branch and contributing to a critical dimension of the debate concerning the role such infrastructures play in the contemporary age, either in continuity and/or in discord with their history. Their territorial and urban relevance suggests the adoption of a broad approach to this issue, unlike the no more tenable vision that used to consider stadiums merely as objects and in terms of their performance. Now, instead, it is necessary to extend such scope to the entire “process-project-product” realm by involving since the early explorations the management matrix indicators associated with the concepts of compatibility, functionality, maintainability, durability, usability, safety underlying a demonstrable assessment of the economic and financial feasibility extended to the entire lifecycle of the infrastructure. The realm of environmental planning and the instrumental, regulatory and procedural framework represent, in complementarity with the functional and morphological-linguistic aspects, the cultural field within which the planning and construction of sport facilities develop themselves. Similarly to the action of rehabilitation and enhancement of the built heritage, the integrated strategies of new construction applied to sport infra-structures define the realistic margin of critical, cultural and design exploration of the potential sport architecture can offer in terms of urban and social regeneration. The actualisation of the urban space and the development of an organic system of public spaces functionally integrated with major sport events is a recent phenomenon that guarantees a certain success when developed in favourable and positive political and structural conditions