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Rather than introducing a UEFA Category 4 stadium as a monumental object, the proposal extends the landscape of Zagreb’s historic Maksimir Park southwards, transforming the stadium into an inhabited topography where architecture emerges from the terrain rather than sits upon it. The site gently rises to conceal the program beneath a continuous public park, preserving visual and physical continuity between the city and the landscape.
The project is rooted in the dual nature of football itself—simultaneously civic and global, spontaneous and ceremonial. Instead of isolating the stadium as an object of spectacle, it becomes a democratic public landscape where sport, recreation, culture, ecology, and everyday urban life coexist.
Two precise landscape incisions define the architectural experience. The first forms a shaded promenade extending the woodland of Maksimir toward the city, choreographing a gradual approach that reveals the embedded stadium only at the final moment. The second cuts through the stadium’s circular geometry, framing a permanent visual dialogue with Maksimir Park and paying homage to Vladimir Turina’s original stadium, whose relationship with the park remains one of Zagreb’s defining urban memories.
The ascent continues across the lifted landscape to a continuous public rim surrounding the stadium. From this elevated promenade, visitors arrive beneath a radial cable roof where a vast central oculus opens dramatically onto the pitch over thirty metres below. Suspended between earth and sky, the experience reconciles the intimacy of the embedded arena with the openness of the surrounding park.
The project transforms arrival into procession, concealment into revelation, and movement into discovery. More than a stadium, it is an architectural landscape—an extension of Maksimir itself—where Zagreb’s oldest public park continues its evolution by absorbing football into its living history.
PADx Architecture in Collaboration with Margaret Arbanas, Clement Blanchet Architecture, Winning Team, TER Agency, & T/E/S/S Engineers.