Carving new arenas out of rock and earth, European architects are bringing much needed allure to that architectural dinosaur, the sports stadium. The largest of these breakout designs—as much environmental sculptures as they are sports meccas—is El Templo Mayor, a 45,000-seat venue now being built in Guadalajara for the Las Chivas soccer team, the most prominent sports franchise in Mexico. Jean-Marie Massaud and Daniel Pouzet, partners in the Parisian firm Studio Massaud, want it to resemble a volcano, and they've even added a layer of what they call "smoke": a shimmering fabric roof stretched across a steel frame that keeps the elements at bay and serves as a massive projection screen. When this potentially ominous volcano opens later this year, images beamed onto its hovering roof—which will be seen by Guadalajarans using the surrounding hillside as their new park—won't be of molten lava but of the beloved Chivas in action.

For the Estadio Insular de Atletismo, opening in March on the island of Tenerife, the two principals in AMP Arquitectos—Felipe Artengo and José María Pastrana—took their inspiration from the volcanic craters that dot the dramatic Canary Islands landscape. They used topographical models, forged in bronze, to design their sloping, elliptical bowl. Later, skilled masons took the volcanic rock excavated from the site and sculpted a beautiful, craterlike wall around the compact, 4,000-seat stadium, low enough to allow views of the Atlantic Ocean. Similarly, three years ago, in Braga, Portugal, Eduardo Souto de Moura carved a soccer stadium into a granite mountainside. It is open to the mountain face at one end and allows for an unobstructed view to the valley below at the other.

The impetus for these new designs is not simply stylistic. Traditional stadiums, those eerie concrete mausoleums that fans have become used to, gobble up a lot of space. Even the new ones. For instance, Peter Eisenman's University of Phoenix Stadium, the striking new home of the Arizona Cardinals that resembles a giant barrel cactus, is surrounded by a parking-lot desert big enough for 14,000 cars and empty much of the year. But at Las Chivas' new home, parking will be inside the volcano and its grassy exterior will be landscaped so that, according to Massaud, "it can be shared by everyone." In Tenerife, an indoor training track is tucked under the air-cooled roof and behind the seats. "We don't want you to see that we have created a huge space," Artengo notes. These new stadium designers want fans to understand that the earth, like sport, is precious.

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