St. Louis soccer-specific stadium recognized as world’s best-designed sports facility.
CITYPARK, home of Major League Soccer’s St. Louis CITY SC, has won the prestigious 2024 Prix Versailles World Title in the sports category.
Established by UNESCO, Prix Versailles recognizes the world’s finest contemporary architecture and design in categories including sports venues, hotels, airports and museums. The Prix Versailles World Jury awarded CITYPARK the top World Title honor in the sports venues category on Monday, Dec. 2 at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. Earlier this year, CITYPARK was shortlisted for the awards when the stadium was named one of the world’s most beautiful sports venues.
“A critical tenet of St. Louis CITY SC’s mission is to see ourselves on the global stage, an exceptional club and neighbor, and help elevate the world’s view of St. Louis and the transformational role sporting venues can play in the community,” said Lee Broughton, St. Louis CITY SC’s chief brand architect and ownership group member. “It is with a great sense of pride that we thank the Prix Versailles World Jury for this incredible honor and our talented partners, HOK and Snow Kreilich, for their exceptional work in designing CITYPARK to be a reflection of our city’s most beloved attributes.”
Designed by HOK and Snow Kreilich Architects, CITYPARK supports the CITY SC ownership group’s strategic pillars of connection, mobility, sport, training and experience. The 22,500-seat stadium (soon to be called Energizer Park under a new naming rights deal) anchors the largest urban professional sports campus in the U.S. and serves as a new model for Major League Soccer project development. The stadium’s inclusive, transparent design invites all of St. Louis to share in the soccer experience and offers a best-in-class fan experience. A flat portico, elegant canopy and slender columns maximize engagement with the city.
“As an urban stadium, CITY is scaled and is porous to the street creating a more vibrant city and a match that feels like it is embedded in St. Louis,” said Julie Snow, Founding Principal of Snow Kreilich Architects. “While the design was very much about the intensity of the sport, it was equally about the ability to build on the creative energy rising in the city, to come together and generate a new civic spirit shaping its future buildings, and, with its porosity, create a more vibrant city.”
“From the earliest stages of design and development, St. Louis CITY SC had a vision for a project that would be more than a stadium. This impressive recognition is a testament to the client’s unwavering commitment to bringing that vision to life,” said Chris DeVolder, director of Sports + Recreation + Entertainment at HOK. “CITYPARK seamlessly balances district connectivity and the fan experience, contributing positively to downtown beyond game days and setting a new precedent for what a stadium can be.”
The stadium has served as a catalyst for broader community development, reenergizing downtown and inspiring growth. In the stadium’s inaugural year, it generated more than $168 million in economic impact, with more than 18% of CITYPARK guests coming from outside the region. The pedestrian-centric design has no back door. All four corners of the building are active and accessible, integrating seamlessly with the neighborhood. Every seat is within 120 feet of the pitch, which sits 40 feet below street level to maintain an appropriate scale for the district. The stadium’s design mirrors the reflective nature of St. Louis’s iconic Gateway Arch (which anchors the other end of downtown’s Gateway Mall) and incorporates impactful public art, including *Pillars of the Valley*.
HOK and Snow Kreilich Architects accepted the award in person. Additional World Titles in the sports category went to təməsew̓txʷ (New Westminster, Canada) for the Special Prize for an Interior and the Olympic Aquatic Centre (Saint-Denis, France) for the Special Prize for an Exterior.
For the full list of 2024 winners and honorees in all categories, as well as World Jury members, please click here.
About HOK
HOK is a collective of future-forward thinkers and designers who are driven to face the critical challenges of our time. We are dedicated to improving people’s lives, serving our clients and healing the planet. Together, we cultivate a culture of design excellence at the confluence of art and science, blending the power of creative expression with a clear sense of purpose. HOK’s Sports + Recreation + Entertainment practice specializes in the design of arenas, stadiums, ballparks, training facilities and entertainment centers. The group designs world-class sports complexes that serve as the centerpieces of successful and vibrant entertainment districts, communities and campuses. hok.com
About Snow Kreilich Architects
Snow Kreilich Architects is a nationally recognized and award-winning architectural studio-based practice in Minneapolis. With each project led by design principals Julie Snow and Matt Kreilich, the studio focuses on producing architecture that performs against multiple measures of design success. This focus has resulted in consistent design recognition for projects that rely on a fresh and intensive design investigation of every project. They have developed shared working methodologies that result in consistently intelligent buildings that are well-conceived and carefully detailed.
