Perkins Eastman
The pandemic has dramatically altered our sports traditions, pastimes, recreation, and competitions. This year’s Super Bowl LV is no different. Tampa Bay’s Raymond James Stadium, designed to accommodate upwards of 65,000 fans, will feel a whole lot roomier on Super Bowl Sunday with capacity capped at 22,000. But though the stadiums and arenas full of loud, passionate fans are at reduced capacities right now, these spaces are still serving vital public needs: as triage hospitals, polling centers, and most recently, as vaccine centers. And, as Scott Schiamberg, Perkins Eastman’s Director of Sport and Exhibition says, this only scratches the surface of their latent potential.
Perkins Eastman’s Future of Sport team, led by Schiamberg, is considering both new and pre-existing issues in sport, drawing from their collective knowledge to identify how COVID-19 presents opportunities to transform sport in ways that could outlast the pandemic itself.
The roster includes planners and designers from within the firm: Jason Harper, Director of Health Care, Josh S. Jackson, Senior Associate, and Rebecca Milne, Director of Design Strategy, as well as experts from sports administration and academia: Merrily Dean Baker, retired Director of Athletics, Princeton University and Michigan State University, Kiernan Gordon, Assistant Professor, Sport and Recreation Management, University of New England, and Glenn MacCullough, Founding Principal of MacCullough Architects.
“In contrast to many others who have been reactive in trying to address COVID-19-related challenges,” says Kiernan Gordon, “we’ve tried to reframe the issue and view the pandemic as an opportunity to reshape structural issues inherent to access, spectatorship, and participation in sport.”