Casa Futbol: Two Architects’ Awesome Idea To Turn Brazil’s World Cup Stadiums Into Housing

FIFA’s World Cup tends to pull up stakes from a country pretty quickly once the trophies have been handed out. The host country still tends to have the problem of figuring out what to do with those stadiums, but there’s one idea so cool it would be stupid to pass it up.

After the tears and champagne have dried up, nations find themselves in possession of multiple massive stadiums with no apparent usefulness. Brazil still has to decide what it’s going to do with the 12 stadiums it built – with no small amount of controversy – for this year’s World Cup.

Viable options include dismantling some temporary buildings and repurposing others. Other plans include keeping the stadiums as event-based venues and some suggest turning them into public parks.

None of those solutions is as cool and interesting as the proposal from Axel de Stampa and Sylvain Macaux of 1Week1Project. Those two architects have proposed turning the stadiums into affordable housing structures. They would efficiently use the space between concrete pylons and around the stadium’s perimeter to construct modular housing and the stadiums could still be used for public events. When not in use, though, the stadiums’ open areas would be available for community use by the people living in the modular housing.

Now tell us that’s not cool.

More than it is cool, it would also help address a serious issue in Brazil. Poverty is a real concern in Brazil and the arrival of the World Cup saw it exacerbated. Some 20,000 residents were evicted from their homes in order to build parking lots and other World Cup facilities, and Brazil’s government caught no small amount of flack from protestors for splurging on stadiums while so many of its residents reside in such crushing poverty.

Calculating the likelihood of the Brazilian government adopting the stadium housing plan is an exercise in futility as it is still unclear whether the facilities would even be able to support such a project. Still, it would be cool though, yeah?

[Via Gizmodo]