ANTIPODES STADIUM

Design Team: Jaime Correa

Fruitland Park has raised enough money to build a hometown stadium in its high-school grounds. This proposal uses the team’s name, “The Antipodes”, as a source of design inspiration while paying homage to some of the most primitive game prototypes. The stadium bleachers are approached through a tiled squared plaza with a sunny Floridian theme and a peripheral blue bench for casual encounters. A roofed proscenium is slightly raised from the ground and contains five entrances (vomitorium), a longitudinal bench, and a giant screen projecting the latest happenings in the field; the prosceninum provides a threshold between the football field and the audience. A small press box floats in the rear wall of the composition dominating the context of the combined racetrack and football fields.

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The minimalist configuration of the bleachers is based on those of the Inca Tlachtli –a primitive game, very similar to American football, played with hard latex balls made from local rubber trees. The angle of vision creates the impression of a sectional pyramid; three vomitorium(s) at ground level connect the filed with the locker and service areas under the bleachers; a wooden press box dominates the view of the racetrack and football fields; a copper proscenium serves as a backdrop for the architectural composition. What course of action took them to the idea of naming a football team as “The Antipodes”? Like Lucretius, “they saw the courses of the stars travelling toward the west; they saw that the sun and the moon always set toward the same quarter, and rise from the same”. Then, they supposed that the heavens sloped downward in every direction and that, somehow, people are simply standing backwards in the opposite side of the earth; those who are standing on the opposite side became their home base goal: “The Antipodes”