stadium projects
All Yerba Buena Center for the Arts installation images courtesy John Foster Cartwright.
Stadium Projects (established 2015) is a architectural-experiencing firm comprised of Monte Masi, Joshua Peder Stulen, and Lex Kosieradzki that focuses on stadiums and their roles as sites for cultural production. Looking at the relationships that communities have to stadium development and the paradigm of placemaking, Stadium Projects address how stadiums project affect into urban space. Through fieldwork and historical research, the collective engages with histories of the commons, cultural capital, historicization, psycho-geography, and urban development.
As part of the 2016 exhibition Work in Progress: Investigations South of Market, Stadium Projects spent a month in residence at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, examining AT&T Park, the waterfront ballpark of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. Alongside numerous video and sculptural tests, the following public events were presented during the residency period:
bleacher-distressing ceremony with simultaneous discussion on the fetish for retro design with stadium construction and the conditions which make ʻretroʼ possible
Public conversation with ecstatic Giants fan, metaphysician, revolutionary optimist, artist, and teacher Shaun OʼDell on positive visualization, group thinking, and joint vision.
“After the Big One: Utopia or Obilivion”: a theatrical reading of a play written by Stadium Projects, in which the San Francisco ballpark floats away in the ocean after an earthquake, with Giants ballplayer Hunter Pence and polymath Buckminister Fuller as the main characters.
Download after the Big One: Utopia or Oblivion performance script here.