Cricket Stadium on top of a Skyscraper in India

designed by Matthew Graham, Mike Lamprides  United States

As India approaches the 63rd anniversary of its independence, it is emerging as a cricket powerhouse. The sport that was left behind by the British, over a hundred years ago, has ultimately been adopted, creating a recreational gift to the nation. The sport has political and cultural implications reaching far beyond the imperialist colonization which initially engendered it. In the ICCT tower we will challenge the very nature of the skyscraper by aggressively reinterpreting programmatic, scalar, and contextual norms.

The traditional setting for a stadium exists on the ground plane. By inverting that norm and elevating the stadium to 300 meters in the air, the contextual and scalar norms of a stadium and a high-rise are simultaneously and radically challenged. The elevation creates a vertical void to be filled with recreational areas for the community.

The form of the building is derived from the sport of cricket itself. Cricket requires a large oval playing surface. The oval floor plates are designed to accommodate an open playing field while support programs are nested between the inner and outer diagrids.