The Architecture of the Playing Field

Shaping Space in Sport

Richard L. Cleary

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English

University of Texas Press
06 May 2025

History of architecture; Sociology: sport & leisure; Sporting venues

Series: Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports

A novel exploration of playing fields as aesthetic and architectural spaces that frame athletes’ creativity and spectators’ evolving experiences of sport.

The playing field is more than an arena for sporting rivalry. It is a laboratory of invention, where athletes and coaches create new uses for the human body in response to the constraints and affordances of space. Indeed, Richard Cleary argues that, from translucent squash courts to the NBA three-point line to the city streets used by skateboarders, all sports have embedded spatial relationships that are also charged with social significance.

The Architecture of the Playing Field explores the aesthetic and physical experiences of the grounds on which we compete. Cleary digs into the perspectives of spectators, athletes, coaches, and umpires—perspectives that have changed along with the shifting configuration and mediation of the field, from early live sports coverage to today’s TV broadcasts overlaid with high-tech graphics and observed from every angle. Cleary shows how rules governing the size, shape, and divisions of the field reflect sports’ entwinement with societies at large, in particular the politics of race and gender. Mindful as well that some sports resist containment, he analyzes the disruptive use of space by snowboarders and parkour athletes. The Architecture of the Playing Field sensitizes us to the interplay of settings and bodies in motion fundamental to the power of sport.

By: Richard L. Cleary
Imprint: University of Texas Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 399g
ISBN: 9781477331293
ISBN 10: 1477331298
Series: Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 06 May 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Richard L. Cleary is a professor emeritus in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught architectural history and theory. He is the author and editor of multiple books, including The Place Royale and Urban Design in the Ancien Régime and Merchant Prince and Master Builder: Edgar J. Kaufmann and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Reviews for The Architecture of the Playing Field: Shaping Space in Sport

In this innovative book, Richard Cleary contends that applying architecture's inquiries to sport can give us new ways of reading the field. Exploring a topic that has largely resided outside of architectural history, The Architecture of the Playing Field offers up novel, well-sourced insights, showing there is much to gain from this fresh premise.--Benjamin Flowers, Ohio State University, author of Beautiful Moves: Designing Stadia Richard Cleary explores the relationships between the rule-based structural features of sport, the contexts in which sport takes place, and the aesthetics of athletes moving through constrained space, as understood through the lens of architecture and undergirded by a wealth of sport-historical knowledge. In informed, engaging prose, The Architecture of the Playing Field makes a significant contribution to the field of sport aesthetics and will be welcomed by a wide range of scholars in sport, architecture, applied aesthetics, and beyond.--Jason Holt, Acadia University, author of Kinetic Beauty: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Sport