Like any labor of love, I’ve been unable to forget that project completely – so I’ve been working on bringing it back to life. A lot of the visualizations I’ve done on Massive Report have been based on its underlying data structures, but for a variety of reasons it appears that I won’t be able to bring the actual scouting system back on any of the platforms for which I write.

My question for all of you (however many dozen of you find this post) is this – would you find a player database useful? What would make such a thing more interesting? There are a number of possible areas of focus. Domestically, the collegiate game might be interesting; would the USL system be a better focus? What about other professional leagues around our region? While I haven’t done the math, I daresay that the percentage of players from these three communities (college, minor league pros, foreign CONCACAF pros) who end up playing in MLS would be an interesting exercise. My hunch is that playing in college is the best predictor for playing in MLS, but given the sheer number of college players it may be that another source might have a higher “hit rate”.

Let me know your thoughts – I’d like to try and get this system up and out there sooner rather than later, but a ton of work remains to be done.

I’ve seen several email memes going around that purport to include pictures of “weird” or “strange” architecture – which unfortunately typically means that the author has found some pictures of structures that, professionally speaking, only fall into the building-as-joke category.

Yes, very clever – a house upside-down. Ooh, a bookstore shaped like a book. Genius!

Having been trained as an architect, and still working around that field, I tend to have a different standard when it comes to buildings – and that perspective extends to stadiums. While the baseball stadium in America seems recently to have become something of a solved problem, there are occasionally some very intriguing examples of soccer stadiums that surface from time to time.

Monoliths

Soccer City Stadium, Johannesburg, South Africa

The first general category that I’ve seen lately has been the monolithic stadium. These tend to have coherent, undistinguished exteriors – frequently in the middle of some vacant site or other context-less place. The above stadium, site of the opening and final of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, is a decent example. The exterior is intriguing, inspired by a pot known as a calabash.

More about this stadium from Architeria.

Allianz Arena, Munich, Germany

Other recent examples of this type of stadium include Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena (above), which has the added benefit of an illuminated exterior that can be made to change colors according to the team playing that day (or some other inspiration). This is also the stadium, btw, which has been replicated out of Lego bricks.

Amalgamations

Unbuilt project for a Havana stadium/arena by Eric Owen Moss

The alternative forumulation is for a less-unified scheme. Typically in English soccer this take the form of places like Highbury or Craven Cottage, where each stand is essentially its own building.

The picture above is one of my personal favorite stadium projects, even though it was never built. One of the hardest things to deal with about a stadium is the seating bowl because the performance parameters can be so strict. In this scheme, however, Eric Owen Moss manages to have quite a bit of fun with the bowl, resulting in a scheme that I think would be quite fun to visit.

Shide, Dalian, China

Continuing in the unbuilt category, this was NBBJ’s proposal for a stadium in Dalian, China. It attempted to embrace a green ideology, proposing a stadium whose form would have filtered the surrounding air and reduce greenhouse gases in addition to looking memorable.

Other formal notes about this stadium is how it attempts to merge the forms of two other stadiums. The outer shell (with the grass exterior) recalls the municipal stadium in Braga, Portugal which was built for the 2004 European Championships, while the inner structure resembles the Renzo Piano-designed stadium for A.S. Bari in Italy (which was itself built for the 1990 World Cup in Italy)

]]> http://bernhardtsoccer.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/stadiums-i-admire/feed/ 0 morphosis7 Soccer City Stadium, Johannesburg, South Africa Allianz Arena, Munich, Germany Havana Project, Eric Owen Moss Dalian, China http://bernhardtsoccer.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/hello-world/ http://bernhardtsoccer.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/hello-world/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:05:33 +0000 Matthew Bernhardt http://bernhardtsoccer.wordpress.com/?p=1 ]]> Crew Stats Report: April 25, 2010

Here is the latest in a series of statistical reports which looks at the Columbus Crew’s 2010 season. This report covers the team’s first five competitive games, including the two-leg series against Toluca in the Champions League.