Hello Birdie — The Stadium and the Ground — On Typology

A 10,000-seat badminton academy in Pingshan, and the case for giving the stadium back to the ground it came from.

There is a question we keep putting on the table at the start of a project, and it is the same question whether the building is a design studio, a foundry, a student center, or a stadium: what is this kind of space, who built it, what was it defending, and which of its walls are still load-bearing? We began The Studio and the School by asking it of the automotive design studio. We asked it of a 1933 foundry on Cavan Road, and of a student center on a Honolulu campus. Pingshan is the same inquiry, aimed at the single most monumental building type we make.

The stadium arrives wearing more inherited certainty than almost any type in architecture. It has an origin story, and — like the design studio — it long ago stopped being asked to justify the habits that origin left behind. So we asked. And two histories, the sport’s and the stadium’s, turned out to be telling the same story from opposite ends.

The Oldest Game With the Newest Name

Begin with a correction, because the usual story is a colonial fiction. Badminton is routinely said to have been invented by the British — codified at a Gloucestershire estate in the 1870s and generously handed to the world. That is authorship claimed, not authorship earned. What the British actually did, in Poona in the 1860s, was encounter a shuttlecock-and-paddle game that had been played across Asia for centuries, add a net and a rulebook, and rename it — first "Poona," then "badminton," after the Duke of Beaufort’s country house where the English upper classes took it up around 1873. Historians are blunt that Badminton House was a fashionable venue, not a birthplace. The empire’s habit was to find a thing already alive in its colonies, formalize it, and re-export it under an English name. Badminton is one of the cleaner examples.

None of this is to strip the British of their real contribution, because an honest history credits everyone in it. They did give the game its modern competitive form — the net, the marked court, the written laws, the championship structure (the Bath Badminton Club’s rules in the 1870s, the Badminton Association of England in 1893, the All England Championships in 1899) that turned a pastime into a global sport. That work was real. What the record will not support is the single word invention.

Because the feather is far older than the name, and it was first put into the air in the East. Two thousand years ago, under the Han dynasty, Chinese soldiers and children were already playing ti jian zi — "kick the shuttlecock" — keeping a weighted crown of feathers aloft with their feet; the earliest references reach back to the fifth century BCE, and the game most likely grew out of cuju, the military kicking sport used to condition troops. Over the next thousand years the shuttlecock spread across Asia and took a new name in every language it touched. In Japan it became hanetsuki, struck with a wooden hagoita paddle as a New Year’s game. In India and Siam it was a courtyard and festival pastime. The racket-and-shuttle version — battledore and shuttlecock — is just as old, attested for two millennia across China, Japan, India, and Siam, and even drawn on the walls of ancient Greece. The shuttlecock is not a British object. It is one of the oldest pieces of play on earth, and its home is the East.

Which turns the familiar irony inside out, and gives this project its deepest justification. This is not a Western sport being hosted in China. It is a Chinese game coming home. The feather that an English garden party laid claim to in 1873 had been in the Chinese air two thousand years earlier — and over the last few decades the competitive heart of the modern sport has returned, decisively, to exactly where it began. To build the definitive badminton academy in China is to close a very long circle.

And it sharpens the architecture rather than softening it. Badminton — jianzi, battledore, the whole feathered family — is a game of air and lightness and close human attention. It was played on lawns and in courtyards and on village ground, at the scale of the body and the room, for two thousand years before anyone thought to ring it with a grandstand. The sport of the lightest object in play, asked now to live inside the heaviest building type we make. If the architecture answers only to the word stadium, it betrays the game. It has to answer to the feather — and to the ground the feather was always played on.

The Stadium Forgot It Was Ground

Here is the fact the typology has spent two thousand years forgetting: the stadium began as landscape. The original — the stadion at Olympia, mid-sixth century BCE — was not a building at all. It was a strip of earth about 192 meters long, and its spectators sat on the natural slopes around it, on grassy embankments reshaped from the hillside below Mount Kronos. Forty-five thousand people watched from the ground itself. There was no monument. There was terrain, a running track, and a crowd sitting on the earth. The seating was the land.

Then the type hardened. Rome freed the seating bowl from the hillside and stood it up as an object in the round — the amphitheater, the Colosseum, the freestanding monument you approach rather than inhabit. And the twentieth century finished the estrangement. The modern stadium was pushed to the edge of the city and set adrift in a sea of parking — an "isolated spaceship," in the recurring phrase, measured in highway lanes rather than transit lines, valued for vehicular throughput rather than for the life around it. It is a building that is dead for three hundred days a year, monumental on the other sixty-five, and connected to its city by nothing but asphalt. At its worst it becomes the Olympic white elephant: Montreal’s stadium, north of a billion dollars, without a permanent tenant since 2004; Rio’s Maracanã, stripped and threadbare six months after the 2016 Games. A type that began as the ground people sat on had become the object no one could get near.

That is the inheritance. The stadium is a monument that forgot it was once terrain — and, ringed by its own parking, it is the loneliest building in the city. Ask the type what it is defending, and the honest answer is: its own separateness.

What Pingshan Puts Back

The client did not ask for a monument. The brief — 4.5 million square feet, a 10,000-seat stadium, a competition hall, a 300-key academy with medical and research facilities, an aquatics complex — asked for something harder: a world-class facility that would not read as an isolated object dropped on the city, but as a civic institution the surrounding community could belong to. Read against the history, the brief was asking for the stadium’s own forgotten origin. It was asking for the ground back.

So the design begins by refusing the monument. The program is drawn from the Hakka round houses of the Pingshan region — the enclosed, communal dwellings that have stood for centuries in Shenzhen’s main Hakka settlement as symbols of unity and belonging — and their circular logic becomes the language that binds the campus into one form. Then the mass is dissolved. Volumes are pushed down as the landscape is pulled up, until the boundary between building and park disappears into a continuous, undulating terrain. Roofs become walkable landscape. Circulation runs across and through the campus rather than terminating at a gate. The architecture meets the ground gently, at the scale of a person rather than a monument.

What emerges is not an object in a field of parking but a civic terrain — an inhabitable park where athletes, spectators, and neighbors move through one shared environment. It is, quite literally, Olympia’s move made again: seating and structure folded back into landscape, the crowd returned to the earth, the monument dissolved into ground. And it is the answer to the feather — a building as light on its site as the sport is in the air, a garden game given back its garden at the scale of a city. Two homecomings happen in one building: the stadium returns to the ground it began as at Olympia, and the shuttlecock returns to the ground it was first launched from in China.

The stadium’s oldest habit is separateness. Pingshan’s whole design is the argument against it.

A Method, Not a Move

This is not a formal trick we happened to like. It is the same method that produced the other work in this series, and it is worth naming because the through-line is the practice itself.

In The Studio and the School, the automotive design studio had forgotten that its best instincts came from the school — open, shared, watched — and the project let the school back in. In the Kwong Soon foundry, a 1933 building had been quietly making the same civic argument for ninety-one years, and the project’s job was simply to keep it speaking. At the Waikiki Student Center, the type wanted to be a big box scaled to program; we broke it down into low forms that participate in the campus and its watershed rather than dominate them. Each time, the move is the same: question the typology, find the argument it has forgotten, and design the correction.

Pingshan is the stadium’s turn. The type forgot it was ground. This project remembers.

The monument keeps the city at arm’s length across a moat of parking. The terrain invites the city in. One of them is what the stadium became; the other is what it was, at Olympia, before it learned to stand apart. Pingshan is not a stadium with a park around it. It is the park the stadium used to be.

A note on where this sits: this is the fourth in our ongoing “On Typology” inquiry, alongside The Studio and the School, Kwong Soon & Co, and the Waikiki Student Center — each a project that begins by asking what a building type has stopped questioning about itself.

Credits. Work completed while Andy Lantz served as Co-CEO, Partner, and Global Creative Director at RIOS; Atlas Lantz Studio acknowledges the shared authorship of the RIOS teams. Project team: Andy Lantz · Dora Lin · Andy Magner · Yuntao Xu · Ji Gan. Project visuals by RIOS.