This designer gives each stadium goer a personalized experience when stars perform.

Stadium shows have broken records in the post-pandemic frenzy for live music. However, stadiums have never been a natural home for music, according to British stage designer Es Devlin, who has created some of the most lauded musical spectacles in recent years, such as Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour. They were designed for gladiatorial combat and competition, not for communal ritual gatherings.”

Devlin’s dedication to enhancing those events has propelled a career including opera, theater, and yes, stadium extravaganzas like the two Super Bowl halftime shows and the Closing Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.

Three decades of Es Devlin’s draft sketches, final stages, and creative philosophy are collected in the recently released book An Atlas of Es Devlin, edited by Andrea Lipps, who also organized the companion exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

A number of celebrities, including Beyoncé, Adele, Kanye West, The Weeknd, and U2, have hired Devlin to design tangible forms for their extensive touring tours. With captivating ideas that have helped her transcend the stadium show’s structural constraints, Devlin has established herself as one of the music industry’s most inventive visual artists.

By fusing video projections, lighting sculptures, and state-of-the-art technology, Devlin has successfully transferred the drama and intimacy of the British theater, where she got her start, to the impersonal scope of stadium tours. “An opera gets the same amount of rigor and attention to detail as a pop concert because why shouldn’t those audiences get the same level of intellect and thinking to any of what might be considered high culture,” adds Lipps.

Devlin also thinks in terms of the population to space ratio rather than these divisions. She says that her role is to turn up the heat and pressurize the cooker, likening a big arena to a saucepan. A designer is invited to introduce a lid in big stadium spaces, she says. It’s quite a simple equation: How can I add an element to achieve a boiling point.