Revamped Adelaide Oval nominated among world's best stadiums but keeps its traditions such as scoreboard

Adelaide Oval's $535 million makeover has kept traditional features such as the scoreboard and northern mound.
Image by Kylie Fleming

Adelaide Oval has broken through the controversy of making it an open stadium by winning a welter of awards and being acknowledged as transforming the city.

Besides attracting millions to the return of Australian rules football to the oval, the venue has hosted international soccer and cricket matches and global music acts, including the Rolling Stones, since it reopened in 2014 after a $535 million redevelopment.

In 2016, it was a nominated with five others (including London’s Twickenham Stadium and Florida’s Daytona International Speedway) to be best stadium in the world, after being shortlisted for world building of the year at the world architecture festival in 2015.

The oval redevelopment, by Cox Architecture, Walter Brooke and Hames Sharley was hailed in 2015 with a national award for public architecture.
The awards jury said:

“The redevelopment of the Adelaide Oval has set a new standard for facilitating a range of sporting and hospitality events within a major sports stadium.
“All parts of the Adelaide Oval have been carefully considered to produce what must be, nationally, one of the most accessible and most spatially dramatic public buildings devoted to sport.”

The Property Council of Australia’s Brian & Poulter Award gave the Oval for the best tourism and leisure development.

A feature of the oval project was to preserve traditional features such as the view of St Peter’s Cathedral and the 1911 scoreboard, designed by F. Kenneth Milne, one of Adelaide architecture’s scions.