Associate Director of the Knowlton School and Professor of Architecture Benjy Flowers and Master of Architecture student Kori Caughenbaugh and others were interviewed by Ohio State Impact for “What the ’Shoe means to architects and engineers.” 

But more broadly if you think about the way we occupy them, we go to stadiums on specific days of the week. We wear specific kinds of clothing. We affiliate with certain groups of people on the basis of their shared kinship with the team. We eat certain kinds of food. We sing certain kinds of songs — they’re like secular hymns. We make vast assumptions about people and their goodness or awfulness on the basis of what jersey they are wearing and in which part of the stadium they are sitting. And we pass these rituals onto our children, much in the same way we do with religious rituals. So if you look at what Howard Dwight Smith did with the stadium, he then went on as the campus architect to make sure that the stadium occupied a visually central role, much in the same way a church or cathedral would have done for a town or a city.

Read more at Ohio State Impact