MOST stadiums are hard to love. Not even the most beautiful are likely to contribute much to a city's urban vitality. Most feel like big empty containers, black holes cut through the city's fabric.
New Yorkers have an added reason to fear them: both the recently abandoned plan for a Jets stadium in Manhattan and the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx were designed to the standards of a second-rate suburban office park.
But as singular civic monuments, stadiums can also be particularly telling. More than dazzling structural accomplishments, they can be an instant window into a culture's values.
Strangely, the most evocative can also be the most barbaric. The taut emotional power of many of the world's most revered stadiums springs from their ability to give architectural form on a monumental scale to the psychological intensity of mass events. The most chilling of these symbolize the coupling of mass conformity and state power - what Elias Canetti called the "closed ring" - as true of the Roman Colosseum as of Berlin's Olympic Stadium, built for Hitler.
But in postwar Europe, some stunning designs began to emerge that evoke neither mass hypnosis nor nationalist extremism - stadiums that seek to transform the collective experience into something more human.
In Italy, the sensual lines and structural delicacy of stadiums by architects like Pier Luigi Nervi became endearing emblems of a country that was struggling to emerge from a backward agricultural economy and the ravages of war. More recent examples in Spain and Portugal serve as a corrective to the monumentality of traditional stadium design, their forms gently breaking open to engage the surrounding landscape.
In America today, most new stadiums reflect the values of late capitalism rather than any such enlightened self-awareness. Stuffed with corporate boxes and concession stands, they often represent a weird blend of rigid class hierarchy and a mob mentality.
Despite the collapse of the Jets proposal - a gargantuan bland box emblazoned with corporate logos and advertising - New York may soon be in store for a large dose of such cynicism. The old Yankee stadium, which at least had charm, is to be replaced by a sleeker, soulless stadium wrapped inside a fake historic skin. And we should expect more of the same in Queens, where the mayor has recently unveiled a plan for a new Mets Stadium.
If a new model is ever going to emerge, it may well be in Brooklyn, where Frank Gehry is designing a stadium for the Nets that will be embedded in layers upon layers of housing.
Mr. Gehry may have the right idea: rather than tinker with the formula, bury it