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.

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.