Sports spectacle: carved into a mountainside, Braga's new stadium is a radical reinvention of the sports amphitheatre.

Europe's latter-day gladiators congregated in Portugal this summer to huff and puff their way through Euro 2004, the 12th quadrennial European soccer championships. Sporting spectacles have become the modern equivalent of Roman circuses in popular imagination, but beyond the dramas on the pitch, perhaps the most remarkable achievement of this footballing fete d'ete, was that it was staged in Portugal, one of the continent's more impoverished countries. As a major sporting event (in soccer terms, second only to the World Cup), Euro 2004 presented considerable logistical and financial challenges, exacerbated by increased fears of terrorism. Nonetheless, from Braga in the north to Faro in the southern tip of the Algarve, eight cities played host to the international soccer circus and its stellar performers.

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In preparation for the championships, the Portuguese authorities embarked on an ambitious programme of stadium building and infrastructure improvements. Seven new stadiums were constructed and three others renovated at a cost of around 550 million euros ([pounds sterling]370 million). A quarter of this came from the state, with the balance raised by local municipalities and the clubs themselves, who will profit in the long term from new grounds and improved facilities. Though there was some inevitable scepticism about the benefits of spending such vast sums in this way, the official rationale is that the tournament will have the effect of boosting tourism, already one of Portugal's most lucrative industries, and that better transport links and new hotels will help to sustain its long-term growth.

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Sporting fiestas are now regarded as a powerful impetus for urban and economic development, but their legacies can be mixed. The most successful example in recent times was the Barcelona Olympics of 1992 (AR August 1992), which kick-started a seismic city-wide regeneration that still continues today: but the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea (AR October 2001) produced a surfeit of expensive stadiums. some of which are now hardly used, as neither country has a strong footballing culture. In Portugal, which does, ambitions are more realistic, with all 10 tournament stadiums being tenanted by existing clubs, the majority of which are in the country's Premier League.

The new stadiums (all by Portuguese architects) are a mixed bag, with little variation on the generic stadium type of object building in the landscape that has persisted since Roman times as the conventional model for the gladiatorial/sports amphitheatre. The stunning exception is the new Braga stadium, where Eduardo Souto de Moura radically re-envisages the amphitheatrical form as a tent dug into a mountainside, in which the man-made artifact simultaneously becomes part of and emerges from the natural landscape.

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In another departure from the familiar stadium form, Souto de Moura dispenses with seating behind the goals, traditionally the haunts of the more riotous, die-hard supporters attracted by tribal camaraderie and cheaper seat prices. In Latin countries, the curvas are often the setting of elaborately staged expressions of club devotion, but the views are generally the worst in the ground. Eliminating the curvas is perhaps an over-optimistic speculation on the social decline of tribalism, but Souto de Moura regards it as a simple expedient that reflects both football's evolving culture and the increasingly exacting demands of the paying public. His elegantly economical solution of two long grandstands, each seating 15,000 spectators in two overlapping tiers, is intended to provide optimum viewing conditions. 'Football today is entertainment, just like cinema, theatre and television,' he asserts. 'Today, no one would be willing to watch a piece by Peter Handke from behind the goal with continuous zoom shots.' *

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Since the twelfth century, the historic, northern city of Braga has been Portugal's ecclesiastic capital and the seat of the country's archbishops. Religion and its various festivals still play a strong part in civic life--on a wooded slope to the east of the city is the famous baroque Escadaria of Bom Jesus, a monumental, processional staircase winding up to a pilgrimage church that attracts large festive crowds throughout the year. On a hillside to the north, Souto de Moura's stadium dominates the surrounding landscape with an equally baroque theatricality, forming a new object of secular veneration.

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However, the stadium is more than just a new home for the local football team, it is also the focus of a new urban park planned around the slopes of Monte Castro and along the course of the river Cavado. Here the northern edge of the city peters out into bucolic countryside, and the municipality has big plans to develop a park for sports and recreation. A swimming pool and sports hall are in the pipeline, as are extensive new landscaping and infrastructure. Souto de Moura's shrine to soccer is just the first step.

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Initially, a site lower down the hill and nearer the river was earmarked for the stadium, but the potential risk of flooding during construction (the Minho region has one of the wettest climates in Europe) was considered too great. Moving the building up the hillside presented a different challenge in the creation of a huge rock-lined amphitheatre that cradles the new stadium in a craggy, primeval embrace. In a geotechnical feat of Herculean proportions, one million cubic metres of granite were blasted out of the hillside and then crushed to make the aggregate used in the stadium's concrete structure, so the building literally grew out of the site.

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The carving and shaping of the hillside was achieved by a succession of small, precise explosions to form a 30m-high cleft in the rock that frames the south-east end of the stadium. Studded by a series of steel pins to prevent landslides, the granite cliff looms over the pitch; the mute drama of manipulated geology replacing the more usual human animation. It is an unequivocally powerful tableau--the bald, bare rock face is barely a couple of metres from the playing surface--but it also posits the slightly surreal spectacle of off-target shots ricocheting unpredictably off the granite. At the opposite end, undulating banks of earth landscaped with grass and trees meld the structure more gently into the landscape, emphasising its strong topographic character.

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This intimate relationship between the man-made and nature has echoes of the ruins of Delphi and other Classical Greek sites, and Souto de Moura's explorations of these prompted reflections on architecture exposed by excavation. Approached from the main external plaza on the north-east side, the stadium resembles a modern archaeological relic poised in an excavated landscape. The two grandstands frame the pitch in symmetrical tiers of seating, but are expressed in quite different ways. The south-west stand is dug into the hillside to create a Piranesian undercroft of stairs, lifts and concourses set against a backdrop of living rock. Light is drawn down into the bowels of this Stygian labyrinth through a series of vertical shafts that extend upwards to a plateau-like terrace wedged into the hillside at roof level. This acts as a public access and gathering point, with panoramic vistas over the stadium and rolling countryside beyond.

On the north-east side, the stand thrusts out at a precipitous angle, like the hull of a ship, rhythmically articulated by broad ribs, each of which contains a staircase. Here the intricacies of circulation are revealed and celebrated as spectators scurry like ants around the various levels. And though there are clear overtones of Kahn in the circular apertures of different sizes punched into the concrete, this was an apparently serendipitous outcome: Souto de Moura was advised that perforating the structure in this way was the most efficient means of reducing its overall mass.

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The two stands are protected by a featherweight roof of ribbed metal panels slung between a network of steel tensile cables. Originally Souto de Moura proposed a thin, curved, continuous awning, such as the one Alvaro Siza designed for the Lisbon Expo (AR July 1998), but opted for a tensile structure following a trip to Peru, where he discovered the extraordinary rope bridges of the Incas, which combine both strength and delicacy. Strung tautly and gracefully across the stands, the roof resembles a giant loom, with two unfinished pieces of cloth. A lightweight V-section truss runs along the long edge of each opaque section, providing lateral stability and support for a lighting gantry, thus eliminating the need for intrusive floodlight towers. Water is drained off the roof at two points into freestanding concrete troughs mounted on the granite cliff face, from where it is discharged down the hillside in a snaking open channel. The cantilevered troughs reach out to the roof, but, tantalisingly, do not quite touch, like God and Adam in Michelangelo's iconic Sistine Chapel fresco.

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Unlike many of the other new stadiums, in which colour is splurged with ritual abandon, Souto de Moura limits his palette to the sober neutrals of the concrete, metal roof and tiers of grey seats. Visceral yellow is used for the elegant graphics and signage, the only instance of applied colour. Green also predominates, but naturally, in the landscaped mounds and the blazing emerald swath of the pitch. Beneath the pitch, which is supported by a forest of mushroom-headed concrete columns, lies a private subterranean realm of parking and players' facilities. A metal grid set around the edge of the pitch diffuses faint natural light into this inner sanctum.

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Though Braga only hosted two first-round matches in Euro 2004, its new stadium provided the most memorable architectural image of the summer, and its part in the life of the city will grow and evolve well beyond the tournament. As his largest building to date, it also marks Souto de Moura's entry into the big league and shows, equally importantly, that the qualities of reticence, sobriety and thoughtful handling of materials that distinguished his work on a smaller scale have not deserted him on a Braga hillside.

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Architect

Souto Moura Arquitectos, Oporto

Stadium consultant

Arup Associates

Structural engineer

AFA Associados

Mechanical engineers

Jose Silva Teixeira, Tiago Fernandes

Electrical engineers 

Antonio Jose Rodrigues Gomes,

Antonio Ferreira, Luis Fernandes

Landscape consultant

Daniel Monteiro

Building contractor 

Soares da Costa 

Photographs

Paul Raftery/VIEW

except No 9 by Christian Richters

* Quoted in Casabella. No 694, p104. Peter Handke is an Austrian writer and playwright.