Webinar | Fields of Culture: Sports, Space & Identity

How can sports architecture shape not only the way we watch a game, but also how we gather, move through cities, and identify with a place? This question framed Architecture Hunter’s webinar Fields of Culture: Sports, Space & Identity, bringing together Rodrigo Vilas Boas, Partner at OODA Architecture, and Alex Thomas, Regional Design Director for Sports & Entertainment and Principal at HKS, for a conversation on sports venues as spaces of culture, performance, and community.

Opening the session, Rodrigo Vilas Boas presented OODA’s approach to sports architecture through three projects developed across different geographies and scales. For him, sports buildings are never isolated objects. They are shaped by context, politics, landscape, client ambition, and public life. From Portugal to Saudi Arabia and Albania, his presentation explored how architecture can respond to highly specific performance requirements while still creating spaces that connect with cities and communities.

The Liga Portugal Headquarters in Porto was presented as an example of architecture as an urban anchor. Located in a previously fragmented area near the city’s ring road and the Ribeira de Granja corridor, the project was designed to move beyond the idea of a closed institutional building. OODA proposed a porous structure that combines offices, a museum, an auditorium, restaurants, public spaces, and football-related facilities under a green carpet. In doing so, the building celebrates football while opening itself to everyday use, becoming part of the life of the neighbourhood rather than simply representing an institution.

With the Al Nassr training center in Riyadh, the focus shifted from urban connection to elite performance. Designed and built within an exceptionally short timeframe, the project was conceived as a discreet “box of performance” placed between football fields. Here, the architectural challenge was less about spectacle and more about precision: organizing player routines, media areas, medical and technical spaces, social zones, and circulation flows so that different users could move through the building without unwanted overlaps. Its façade, informed by local references and prefabricated construction systems, gives the club a strong identity while remaining a background to the activity of the players.

Rodrigo also presented a stadium vision for Korçë, Albania, developed within a broader strategy to use sports infrastructure as a catalyst for territorial development. Rather than proposing a stadium as an isolated monument, OODA imagined a sports landscape connected to the city, the mountains, and a wider green corridor. The project asked what the next generation of stadiums could be: not barriers within the urban fabric, but open, mixed-use, landscape-driven spaces.

The conversation then expanded with the introduction of Alex Thomas and HKS’s global work in sports and entertainment. Together, the session highlighted sports architecture as a field where performance, identity, infrastructure, and collective emotion intersect. These are spaces designed for athletes and fans, but also for cities, rituals, memories, and everyday public life.

_article written by Daniela Moreira da Silva
_speaker 01: Rodrigo Vilas Boas [Partner at OODA Architecture]
_speaker 02: Alex Thomas [Regional Design Director, Sports & Entertainment and a Principal at HKS]