Benjamin D. Lisle Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American Culture Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017, 328 pp., 76 b/w illus. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780812249224 Howard Shubert Architecture on Ice: A History of the Hockey Arena Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2016, 328 pp., 160 color illus. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780773548138 Over the past two decades, the stadium as a building type has undergone a profound transformation. For most of the twentieth century, it was the preserve of builders and engineers far more than of architects. Indeed, the most prolific designer of stadia, not just in those years but perhaps ever, Archibald Leitch, was trained, depending on your historical research, as either a mechanical engineer or a “factory architect.”1 In the past century, the stadium generally was regarded as a project of modest architectural but specific commercial ambitions (with some rare, but notable, exceptions). Much has changed recently, owing to circumstances largely exogenous to design per se but central to the powerhouse role that sports play in the economies of cities around the world. In our present moment, a stadium is likely the single largest, most technologically complex, and, perhaps most important, expensive building in any given city. In addition to large, corporate-structured firms well known for their stadium designs (Populous, HKS, GMP Architekten, AECOM), there are now Pritzker Prize–winning architects (Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid Architects, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Peter Eisenman, RCR Arquitectes) designing stadia, often more than one. This transformation is global in scope, with novel, formally ambitious, and bespoke projects going up not just in the former stadia redoubts of Europe and the Americas but in East Asia, Africa, and nearly everywhere else as well. And yet, in spite of the scale, cost, and complexity of stadia, architectural historians have largely ignored them. Simon Inglis, author of two definitive guides to stadia in Great Britain and Europe, commented on this lack of attention more than three decades ago, noting that Nikolaus Pevsner's “multi-volumed Buildings of England , the most comprehensive survey of British architecture ever accomplished, mentions only two grounds in passing—Wembley and Hillsborough.”2 …