I had indeed only just joined, albeit well into the second half. Worse still, I was watching a recording and already knew the result.

By contrast, my seven-year-old grandson Sam, woken by his father to watch the same 06:00 recording as a pre-school treat (resplendent in his England kit), experienced drama and uncertainty. Sitting on their sofa in Nottingham, Sam believed the match was unfolding live. Not his father. Despite having deliberately avoided learning the result himself, Ben nevertheless knew that the game had ended long before he switched on the family television.

Having done the same thing many times for Formula 1 Grand Prix races, and for Wimbledon tennis finals, I can attest that even without knowing who won, simply knowing that the outcome has already been determined inevitably dulls the excitement.

So, in this case, knowing that England had secured a place in the quarter-finals, I watched devoid of anticipation.

All this led to a reflection on the importance of ‘being there’ – present, at the same place, in real time. Like sport, architecture is experienced over time as much as through space. This simple observation has been a personal preoccupation throughout my career in sports architecture. It also reminded me of my old boss Cedric Price, who observed:

‘. . . the real definition of architecture is that which through a natural distortion of time, place, and interval creates beneficial social conditions that hitherto were considered impossible.’

No single observation has influenced my thinking about sports architecture more profoundly. It opened up the wider question of anticipatory design that informed Cedric's work, particularly the Fun Palace, Potteries Think-Belt and Magnet projects.

A little-known image of Fun Palace.

Fun Palace embodied this agenda in several ways:

• As a kit of parts: An open scaffolding framework was equipped with gantry cranes capable of plugging in, removing and relocating prefabricated floors, walls and activity pods as needs changed.
• Through the distortion of time: Spaces were conceived as transient. A theatre could become a dance hall or lecture space within hours. Architecture became a process rather than a fixed object.
• By distorting distance: Early cybernetic systems, developed with the British inventor and polymath Gordon Pask, monitored patterns of occupation so that circulation routes and activity spaces could respond to shifting user behaviour.
• Through planned obsolescence: True to Price's belief that architecture should not outlive its usefulness, Fun Palace was conceived with a lifespan of around ten years before complete dismantling.

Price argued that the lengthy gestation of major projects all too often rendered conventional architecture obsolete almost before completion. His answer was anticipatory design: open-ended frameworks capable of accommodating technological and social change, rather than fixed enclosures.

Former RIBA President Alex Gordon's 1972 maxim, 'long life, loose fit, low energy', offered an interesting counterpoint. Whereas Gordon advocated durable, adaptable frameworks capable of continuous evolution, Price proposed the more radical idea of planned impermanence.

Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands’ intelligent application of ‘Long-life Loose-Fit’ to housing.

Richard Rogers acknowledged Fun Palace as an important influence on the Pompidou Centre (though certainly not the only one). I would place Pompidou as being somewhere between the Price/Gordon philosophies. Its exposed serviced framework and flexible floorplates clearly echo Price's vision, while its remarkably durable structure equally embodies Gordon's long-life, loose-fit principles. However, against Gordon's aspiration for low energy and Price's enthusiasm for obsolescence, the energy-inefficient Pompidou (currently undergoing a major retrofit) would, ironically, become a permanent national monument.

If we are looking for the closest realised descendants of Fun Palace, I would move away from museums in favour of sports architecture. Although conceptually diluted and lacking Fun Palace’s social ambition, buildings such as US Bank Stadium, home of the Minnesota Vikings, have come remarkably close. There, sophisticated engineering enables major reconfiguration of the seating to maintain compliant sightlines for sports as diverse as baseball, basketball, ice hockey and American football.

Various configurations at US Bank Stadium in downtown Minneapolis.

Likewise, Tottenham Hotspur's recent stadium design incorporates a 10,000-tonne grass pitch that slides aside to reveal an artificial surface for NFL games, concerts and other major events – without damaging the natural grass playing area.

These engineering interventions carry enormous financial implications. As a former chief executive of Wembley Stadium once told me, they represent the ultimate in 'sweating the asset'—maximising venue usefulness throughout the year. Flexibility, therefore, becomes not merely an architectural virtue but an economic strategy.

Tottenham Hotspur’s sliding and removable pitch.

The irony is that the most successful anticipatory buildings may ultimately acquire precisely the permanence that Price questioned. Azteca Stadium reminds us that flexibility alone cannot explain why certain buildings become culturally indispensable. Opened in 1966, it has hosted athletics, boxing and many other events alongside football. It staged the largest attendance in boxing history, when 132,247 spectators watched Julio César Chávez defeat Greg Haugen in 1993.

Such buildings become repositories of collective memory — places where successive generations remember not simply what happened, but where it happened. This helps explain why victories achieved in places such as Azteca resonate beyond the result itself. When England walked onto that pitch, the squad knew that only two men's national teams had previously won a competitive international there against the home side. Places assume psychological weight.

That brings us full circle to an issue that Cedric Price may have underestimated: the importance of architecture to national identity and collective memory. How does one reconcile an appetite for planned redundancy with the history of cherished landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House, or the old Wembley Stadium, where generations have celebrated great triumphs and endured the most painful of heartbreaks?

Price was surely right to argue that architecture should anticipate change rather than resist it. Yet the greatest buildings teach an equally important lesson. As with my grandson Sam’s experience that morning in Nottingham, they bind successive generations to shared places and shared moments in time.

The best buildings do not merely occupy time—they represent it.