How to waste €200m by trying to please everyone

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The Stadio Delle Alpi was built in Turin for the Italia ‘90 World Cup. You can imagine what the brief should’ve been: create a soccer stadium that a billion people will see on the television (make it look good) and that some of the world’s most passionate football fans and players will visit (make it work for the spectators and players).?

How, then, did the Stadio Delle Alpi get demolished before its 20th birthday, a mocked failure of the football world, and disparaged by the teams who were gifted it after the tournament?

The answer comes down to the specification, or ‘brief’. Politicians, financiers and football association FIFA wanted different things, and the brief sought to please them all.?

The City Council of Turin built the stadium, but needed some financial assistance from other bodies. Enter the Italian Olympic Committee who, wanting to make sure they got their money’s worth, insisted that the new stadium host an athletics track around the perimeter of the pitch. They envisaged the Stadium of the Alps holding international athletics events. But the brief didn’t include (or the land couldn’t accommodate) the warm-up track that world-class competitions need, so no international athletics events ever came close to the stadium.

Worse, the athletics track meant that spectators of football matches were incredibly far from the pitch - up to 167m from the action. Everyone knows the world’s best stadia create a feverish atmosphere because fans are piled close and high up around the pitch. Not in the Stadio delle Alpi.?

To pay for the loans that fed the stadium build, advertising was key, so hoardings were set up around the pitch. This meant, though, that nobody in the first few rows of the stadium could actually see the action on the pitch. A 60,000-seater stadium could only accommodate 59,111 who could actually see the match.

The loans also meant that the rent was very high, financially hobbling any club that used it. The costs were so high that the stadium was actually home to two Turin teams, Torino and Juventus. For years, neither team’s fans had the pride of their own stadium, a pride that drives commercial interest and performance on the pitch.

Finally, there was just the bad luck of timing. The stadium was completed at the point where football moved from an amateur sport to a money-filled professional game, meaning that stadia also had to match the brand promise that came with clubs aiming for the big time.?

In the end, 18 years after opening at a cost of €200m, Juventus bought the stadium from the City of Turin for €25m, ripped it down, and built a football stadium - no compromises - that is sold out every weekend.?

Our team builds (and rebuilds) some of the most beautiful schools in the world. By beautiful, we mean that the buildings work for the people who use them, gently opening up potential for new approaches teams have dreamed of, providing room for changing plans and future ambitions. And the spaces themselves bring a smile to your mind.?

All of that beauty starts with a clear and simple design brief, where the people who will use the space are able to write down who they are, where they want to be, and why the current spaces they have hold them back from what they dream of doing.?

When we write the brief, in our ‘Dear Architect’ letter , it achieves clarity that pushes the boundaries of what educators thought possible so that architects can draw them.?

Often, though, the brief comes to us reading something like this: build this, please (followed by some bullet-pointed assumption-riddled spaces).?

Compounding the assumptions behind what matters most is a perennial headache triggered by a word that some of the big-name, big-fee rockstar school architects promote as a school’s most prized design principle.?

Flexibility.?

Nothing could be further from the truth.?

Flexibility infects architectural briefs and strategic planning with fog, obscuring what people really want or need.

Flexibility tends to give uncertainty a place to hide.?

Flexibility creates ambitious fuzziness.

Flexibility glosses over the much more challenging idea that people don’t know what they don’t know.?

If you want real flexibility, you first have to do the hard work of getting crystal clear on what matters most to you. You gain flexibility because you’re able to shed unnecessary baggage, freeing yourself from the weight of time, money and energy constraints that were tied up in work that wasn’t driving the team forward.?

The next time you’re setting out on an ambitious project - building a space or building an idea - do not start by talking to the Chief Financial Officer, asking about the budget, the time, or how we can do more of what we’re doing today.

Start by asking the people who will use the space or the strategy what kind of experience they want to have next, in the future. Then audit all the other things they want to stop doing.

Design for what people need next, not for what they’ve been trying to shed today.