From dazzling bungalows to elegant sci-fi palaces: How architecture has brought football stadiums to life | Build

forOne day, an ailing Shankly, a man so beloved by Liverpool that there is now a hotel in the city bearing his name, said: “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed in that attitude. I can assure you it is much more important than that.”

Inevitably, Shankly appears in Home Ground, an exciting new exhibition about the architecture and social culture of football grounds. The legendary manager was pictured enjoying the applause of an adoring crowd, part of the Kop’s farewell tableau before he switched from the churning tribal terrace to a quieter, all-seater stage.

Full of romance and obsession with the beautiful game, Liverpool is a great place to delve into the history and fate of football grounds. Everton have just moved to a very stylish new stadium, the 52,000-capacity Hill Dickinson Stadium on the Mersey seafront, which neatly encapsulates football’s distance, its venues having gone from rain-soaked terraces, flat caps and leaden balls, to an upscale, multi-sensory experience, with those who can afford it being pampered in private boxes and filled with food. Luxurious, no different from visiting the opera.

Illustrated through a rich collection of drawings, models, photographs and other ephemera, the exhibition’s chronological presentation begins with a plan of the 1906 Anfield stadium designed by Scottish architect Archibald Leitch. The towering terrace of 132 steps at the end of the house became known as the Kop, after the bloody Battle of Spion Kop on the hilltop during the Boer War.

Drawing on his early experience designing factories and warehouses, Leach became a master of early football stadiums. With his incredible efficiency, he has scored more than 20 goals across the UK, including at Stamford Bridge (Chelsea), Highbury (Arsenal) and Ibrox (Glasgow Rangers). Over the course of 29 years, he also designed Goodison Park, home of Liverpool’s great rivals Everton. It is still used by the women’s team, and was the first stadium in Britain to have seats and stands on all four sides.

England may have invented and formalized the game, but in terms of field design, it was its European neighbors who really ran with the ball. In Florence, Fiorentina enlisted the help of the famous modernist Pier Luigi Nervi to create a fascinating exercise in reinforced concrete that brilliantly exploited the material’s shaping and sculptural potential. In Rotterdam, the 1937 Feyenoord Stadium embodied Dutch functional ideals Niue Bowen Movement (New Building), a lightweight structural steel frame used to suspend the upper tier above the lower tier, providing an unobstructed view of the stadium, was revolutionary for its time.

In a nice touch, the thematic sections of the exhibition are indicated by specially designed football scarves in the emerald green of the grass under the floodlights. In the section dedicated to Italia 90, graphic designer Alberto Borri’s final World Cup poster features a football field in the Colosseum in Rome, the original stadium and theoretical point of origin for all modern football stadiums. Italy has gone to great lengths in its hosting duties, spending billions upgrading existing stadiums and building new ones, including a sunken bowl in Bari designed by high-tech Genoese architect Renzo Piano, with skeletal ribs resembling a whale’s carcass.

Dominating events like a giant wedding cake is typical of Milan’s San Siro stadium. For Italia 90, a completely new structure was built over the original 1926 stadium, incorporating red steel roof trusses supported by spiral-shaped turn towers. It is worth noting that when crowds flock to the keys, the towers appear to spiral, in a strange optical illusion. Although it remains the base for Milan and rivals Inter, after years of protracted controversy, its days appear to be numbered.

There are some surprising heirs to Archie Leach. Although you might not think so, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are big football fans with their company producing some of the most innovative contemporary stadium designs. Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena is made of nearly 3,000 inflatable foil pads impregnated with LED lighting, and can instantly change the color of its skin, like an enormous glowing chameleon. In Braga, in northern Portugal, Eduardo Souto de Moura created a stadium in an abandoned limestone quarry, a natural amphitheater where a wayward shot at goal bounces off a cliff face.

“Spaceship” is an oft-used phrase, but football stadiums have an otherworldly aura, with giant modern sculptures looming over busy neighborhoods, reminiscent of Philip Larkin’s “Ships in the Streets”. But size isn’t necessarily everything. In Galashiels in Scotland, the 750-person Gala Fairydean jewelery stand resembles a piece of concrete origami, designed by Peter Womersley in 1965.

A pivotal moment was legislation to develop all-seater stadiums in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster, the impact of which still reverberates nearly four decades later. Before Hillsborough, 56 people died in the 1985 Bradford City Stadium fire, in which the dilapidated main stand turned into inferno within 270 seconds. Such disasters were a hideous low point in British football’s history, showing how fans were viewed in a degrading and inhumane light by the authorities, and how ancient structures were turned into crumbling death traps.

Inconceivably far removed from the era of angry crowds on acres of terraces, the future of football stadiums lies in them being increasingly sustainable and resilient. After the retractable roof comes the retractable stadium, such as at the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium by arena design specialists Populus, which can accommodate everything from concerts to American football.

Forest Green Rovers, currently managed by former bad boy Robbie Savage, may be a small club playing in the fifth tier of the English Premier League, but FIFA have described them as the “greenest team in the world”, showing that the club can prioritize sustainability and achieve success at the same time. Her proposal to build the world’s first wooden playground, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, will form the centerpiece of a new eco-park for the local community.

The growth of women’s football is also expected to help shape the stadiums of the future. American club Kansas City Current is the first club to play in a stadium dedicated to women’s professional soccer, and includes minor design changes such as modified seating and sight lines, all designed to attract a more family-oriented fan base.

Architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner once said: “A bicycle barn is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” For most of its history, football stadiums have been more cycling grounds than cathedrals, but their time has now come in a stunning way.

• Home Stadium: Football Architecture Exhibition at RIBA North, Liverpool and Tate Liverpool, from 15 October to 25 January