Football stadium transformed into a native forest

In Austria’s largest public art installation to date, a football stadium has been transformed into a native Central European forest.

For Forest is the addition of almost 300 trees to the inside of the Worthersee Football Stadium in Klagenfurt, Austria, in an attempt to challenge perceptions of nature and its future based on today’s issues of climate change and deforestation.

Artist Klaus Littman based the installation on a dystopian drawing by Austrian artist and architect Max Peitner, which he discovered almost 30 years ago.

According to Littman, the concept of enclosing a forest in a stadium was borne out of the desire to compare nature with animals in a zoo – a suggestion that nature may one day only be found in specially designated spaces.

A collaboration with Enea Landscape Architecture, the forest project includes a diverse range of species native to Central Europe, including silver birch, aspen, white willow, hornbeam, field maple and common oak.

The public installation will end on 27 October 2019, after which the forest will be replanted on a nearby public site.