Al-Merrikh Stadium

Sudan became independent in 1956; Abdel-Moneim Mustafa came home from Leicester with an architecture degree in 1958, and by 1962 was building the stadium for Omdurman's Al-Merrikh club. Work on the ground began in 1962 and it opened on 30 November 1964, the same year he became the first Sudanese lecturer in the new architecture department at the University of Khartoum. The ground is a plain, economical piece of civil engineering — an oval of raked concrete terracing banked into the ground, a covered tribune, a ring of small units let into the outer wall at street level — and it holds 43,000. Sudanese fans call it the Red Castle. Mustafa went on to build the Bank of Khartoum and the BADEA headquarters, and he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture in Sudan, the subject of a Docomomo Journal study of the post-independence era. The photograph here is his own, released through the Canadian Centre for Architecture.