Indonesians love to squat as they sit, so perhaps designers had that cultural quirk in mind when designing the seating for this stadium in Semarang, Central Java.
Last week, the Citarum Stadium hosted a soccer match between local team PSIS Semarang versus PPLM Jakarta. Never mind the soccer, what caught the world wide web’s attention from the game was the practically zero leg space between seats in the stadium, as shown in these viral photos posted on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/wareng.casual/posts/1643158702411219
StadiumDB, a website dedicated to providing data on soccer stadiums around the world, picked up on the Facebook post and pointed out the ridiculousness of the seating arrangement, calling it amusing yet dangerous at the same time.
Apparently not everyone knows this: if you install seats, leave some room for the legs. Stunning what they did in Semarang! #Indonesia
[thanks for the tip @reullot!] https://t.co/O9ou48GrRt pic.twitter.com/8FBiLURI3B— StadiumDB.com (@StadiumDB) December 29, 2017
How did this huge design flaw come to be? Well, according to Kompas, PSIS Semarang recently won promotion to Indonesia’s top soccer league. In anticipation of larger crowds, the club is currently renovating its home stadium, Jatidiri, so the team is holding pre-season training and exhibition matches at Citarum Stadium for the time being.
The seats at Citarum were recently installed to accommodate the influx of PSIS supporters, though it seemed to be such a rushed job that the people in charge failed to take leg room into account.
Aside from ergonomics, what makes little sense from a cost perspective is that they could have saved a lot of money if they only installed seats on every other row. As it stands (no pun intended), spectators can either rest their feet on the seats in front of them (making the tight seating arrangement counterintuitive if their goal was spectator maximization in the stadium) or squat on their seats — either option hardly being dirt-free:
Well, at least PSIS’ management took the criticisms into account, announcing that they will remove seats from every other row in the near future to provide much-needed leg room for spectators.
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