Bluffer's guide to the world's great stadiums

If you want to be an instant expert on sports stadiums, you could do worse than bookmark this site, World Stadiums, which has almost every major world stadium catalogued, displayed and its main features explained. Have a look and see what imagination can do when it's properly unleashed.

To start you off, you might want to check out Stadium Design Principles, and then perhaps head over and check out their selection of the most architecturally distinctive stadiums of all sizes, from the 25,000-seater Dr. Magalhães Pessoa stadium in Portugal to the 150,000-seater R. May Day Stadium in Pyongyang.

And you can check out a whole bunch of stadiums of 60,000 size to get you up to speed with what sort of scale to expect for the proposed Auckland stadium, and just what can be done with them. Comparing them to NZ's existing stadiums might be a useful exercise.

Included too for example are both the Estádio Municipal de Braga in Portugal (left, above) that the Domain Stadium Promotion Group have suggested as a model for a Carlaw Park stadium with a minimum footprint, and the 63-000 seater Saitama Stadium in Japan (right) also cited as a possible model for a Carlaw Park stadium sited within the trees of the domain edge.

You might like to complete your visit by looking at the stadiums of the future, the stadiums of the world currently either on the board or under construction, and consider just how the waterfront bedpan proposed for Auckland might fit within this rather attractive group.

LINK: World Stadiums website
Carlaw Park option must be put on table - Domain Stadium Promotion Group, Scoop

TAGS: Stadium, Architecture, Sport