- ExtraSpatial: E-Sports Tower Arena
- January 2020
- Evolo Skyscraper Competition 2020 – Entrant
- Catherine He
CONCEPT
“Extraspatial” is a quality achieved through the symbiosis of physical and virtual space. The physical space establishes the locality, identity, program, and hardware, while the virtual space generates flexibility, expansion, enhancement, and inter-connectivity. Extraspatial buildings exist in both the physical and virtual world. Thus, they can be experienced by both local and virtual visitors. The mixture of these two kinds of space eliminates physical barriers, creates connections, and enables responsiveness.
As the cost of physical space continues to grow and as daily experiences steadily migrate to the virtual realm, extraspatial buildings can help bridge the gap and become a new interface through which users interact with the virtual world.
PROPOSAL
E-sports is a rapidly expanding sector of the entertainment industry, with hundreds of millions of viewers located in every part of the world. The inherent virtual nature of e-sports, has resulted in a diverse, tech-forward community of fans and players connected online through various virtual means – in-game or otherwise. As popularity of e-sports continues to grow, so does demand for purpose built arenas where fans can meet up and watch their teams compete.
This project proposes a reconfiguration of the stadium typology – synthesizing building and virtual technologies to adapt to the needs of e-sports fans, to expand and enhance user experience, as well as to bypass the spatial constraints of cities and programmatic inefficiencies of traditional stadiums.
The “tower arena” fits into a single block in downtown Vancouver BC, Canada. It is located adjacent to two existing traditional sports stadiums: BC Place (54,000 seats) and Rogers Arena (18,910 seats). The proposed tower is a mix-use structure which houses three different sized e-sports arenas, a welcome concourse, and various public and commercial amenities.
The footprint of the tower is compact, creating a large public plaza where the mixing of reality and virtual begins. Within the boundaries of the plaza, fans from all around the world can meet physically, virtually, or both. Inside the arenas, seats can be filled with regular visitors or avatars of fans. Each arena has up to 10 “mirrors”, which increases the capacity of virtual attendees up to 10 times the original, with endless potential for future expansions and re-configurations. The largest arena has a local capacity of 3,200 seats, expandable virtually up to 53,200 seats.