Building a large stadium for a professional club that never arrives: Heerlen managed it. Kaldeborn stadium is what remains of a time when the city imagined a much larger role for itself in Limburg’s professional football.
Plans for a multifunctional sports complex emerged in the 1950s. Heerlen architect Laurens Bisscheroux was commissioned to design the stadium. The complex was completed in 1962. Its original ambitions allowed for around 25,000 spectators.
Football had already moved on
The plans for Heerlen’s own professional club turned out differently. Sportclub Rapid ’54 lacked a suitable ground and soon merged with Juliana of Kerkrade to become Rapid JC. By the time the stadium was finished, the region’s football map had already changed.
That does not make Kaldeborn a stadium where nothing ever happened. Amateur football and other sports found a place there, and the complex also hosted special matches. The contrast is mainly between the great expectations during construction and the role it actually played afterwards.
When you photograph an empty sports venue, the very thing it was designed for is missing: a crowd. That changes the relationship between pitch, stands and entrances. Without those thousands of people, the space can seem above all very large and quiet.
That emptiness is central to this series. The photographs show the condition during my visit. They do not mean that the whole Kaldeborn sports complex was unused at every later date. The municipality also lists other sports facilities there; the stadium and the wider sports area are not the same thing.
For me, Kaldeborn remains an ambition built in concrete. Its scale still shows what people intended, even when reality took a different direction.
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