Self-sanitising escalators, more space and different urinals – how stadium architecture will change in a COVID… – The Athletic

The age of the long trough-style urinal at football stadiums might be dead.

The return of football fans to stadiums after the better part of a year away due to COVID-19 restrictions is a welcome one. Football is nothing without fans goes the motto, and a live audience to interact and enliven the football experience is a welcome one.

The return of fans also presents a challenge from a health and safety perspective. While stadium capacities remain limited, football clubs and organisers are now required to made adaptations to the match-day experience to help with social distancing rules. Temperature checkpoints and hand sanitiser stations are in, and design practices geared towards getting as many fans into a small area such as trough urinals are out.

You want to lose one urinal, not two urinals between every other one, says Christopher Lee, managing director of Populous, the architects behind the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, about the toilet dilemma. Ins and outs, clearly defined one-way systems.

Populous is a global architecture and design practice known for their work on sporting and musical concert arenas. For UK-based sports fans, you would have encountered their work on visits to the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and the Emirates Stadium as well as Tottenham. Lee spent nine years working closely with Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy to deliver the new stadium. As he explains, the process from conception to creation differed somewhat to previous sporting venues.

I think the evolution in the whole stadium genre (has reached a point) of everyone who comes to our venue whether youre in the most expensive or the least expensive seat should have a phenomenal experience.

Ive had lots of discussions with Daniel about this and the really simple thing is our competition at Tottenham is not Arsenal, our competition is Tottenham High Street and Islington High Street because we want our supporters to come to our venue one, two, three hours before (a game) and stay one, two, three hours afterwards. To have great food, have great drinks and to see their friends.

Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is considered by many to be at the forefront of modern stadium design. Boasting retractable pitches, with one specially designed for NFL (the Atlanta Falcons will play a regular-season game there later this year) and with an eye on hosting music concerts, the ground seeks to be multi-layered and capable of transitioning from one public event to another with relative ease. That was the plan for the stadium for when it was unveiled in April 2019 and that plan now looks to resume with the 2021-22 Premier League season.

As the second-newest stadium in the Premier League behind Brentford, the adaptations the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium will have to make due to COVID-19 will be different to some of the leagues older grounds.

Therell be more space inside the venues, so you can accommodate social distancing. There will clearly be more thought given to how can you maintain social distancing on a concourse, get to a concession or get to a restroom, says Lee. Outside the venues, I think, is going be one of the bigger differences and how do we start incorporating health checks and health screening on top of the security screening?

I think one of the really interesting bits I have found (with stadium adaptations) is the acceleration of both wellness as an idea within our built environment how air quality, cleanliness, all of the pieces which are kind of obvious from a sort of post-pandemic position. But I think the interesting bit is actually the acceleration of green and sustainable technologies. Its slightly tangential, but you can clearly see the move to say: we want our buildings to be more responsible, we want them to be cleaner and healthier and safer, we want better ventilation. We want better quality of air, we want cleaner services, but we also want our buildings to be more sustainable, we want them to run on clean technology or clean electricity, we want them to recycle their water.

But does the idea of wellness and being green run counter to more historical aspects of stadium design?

Theres an ever-growing tension when designing the seating bowl, adds Lee. Clearly we want an incredibly intimate atmospheric seating bowl, and a lot of that is about proximity and density and all the bits we love about the great football stadiums, or historic football stadiums, is the compactness and proximity. The opposite trend is as a nation and a world getting bigger and wanting more comfort. People want bigger seats and more space and theyre sort of counteracting.

For Lee and his team, social distancing guides have presented a new challenge in stadium design. In March 2020, as the world went into lockdown, Populous created a global taskforce, drawing on the expertise of 40 architects and designers around the world to come up with ideas on the future of sporting and music venues. One of the more immediate challenges for existing venues was that of seating with many governments recommending a two-metre distance between people.

How does your seating grid work against that module if youre having to knock out every other seat? says Lee of the design challenges. A lot of the work were doing is now how do we lay our seats centre-to-centre, spaced so that you only lose one seat between every seat if you have to go to social distancing, rather than two?

COVID-19 bubbles created another consideration. Venues cannot simply take out every other seat for audiences. A family of four watching a football game would have a different seating consideration to a group of three season ticket holders who traditionally go to the pub as a trio before viewing the game together. Ahead of the return of fans, Populous designed a workaround for their clients known as a parametric tool a piece of software allowing venues to devise different seating scenarios based not only on the proposed fan attendance, but the type of fan that may attend an event. Learnings taken from the return of fans and full attendance stadiums in New Zealand helped inform the work and now the tool has been used by Premier League clubs, including Arsenal and Tottenham, along with ticketing companies such as Ticketmaster to create optimal seating arrangements as more and more fans return to games.

The stadium experience has been altered in the short to medium term for the match-going fan.

As for the long-term plan? That could take a while with clients asking what they need to do to accommodate global health considerations.

How do we build in hand sanitisers, PPE provision, temperature checks, alongside all of the security people? asks Lee.

One design consideration for venues will be touch-free surfaces. The experience of the future could see fans use doors, toilet flushes, taps and order drinks without having to touch anything. Escalator handrails might become self-sanitising too.

I think fans will be so overjoyed to be back in watching live sport that they will accept that things arent, or wont go back to exactly the way they were, at least for a period of time social distancing, following one-way systems, wearing your facemask. If thats the requirement, I do think theyre transferable.

Fans are back, and the football experience will be a little different, but hopefully for the betterment of everyone.

(Photo: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)

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Self-sanitising escalators, more space and different urinals - how stadium architecture will change in a COVID... - The Athletic