Athletic The Stadium
Written by Judith Arellano Torres Bright orange pillars thrust up from out of the concrete foundation, tantalizing the eye with their scale, precision, and power. They look like giant orange T-square rulers holding aloft a huge, oval bowl of ridged concrete. It is a picture of surprising monumentality, not because of the stadium’s height—19.35 meters or a mere five-story building—but because of the expanse of its 25,000-square-meter footprint.
The Stadium’s color palette of orange, charcoal gray, ash gray, and black was inspired by the fury with which Mount Pinatubo announced its existence to the world three decades ago when magma burst through its jungle-covered dome and ejected a column of ash 34 kilometers into the atmosphere. The volcano’s 1991 eruption forever changed the landscape of thousands of square kilometers of farmland, trade, and industry across the provinces of Pampanga, Tarlac, and Zambales. It forged an alien identity on the land that residents and the government have
