Evaluating sports architecture through user perception and experience: insights from three Shanghai sports venues

As the development focus of Chinese sports architecture has shifted from pursuing quantity to improving quality and prioritizing human-centered design in recent years, creating sports environments that deliver exceptional experiences through design has become a new challenge for architects and engineers. However, existing research on sports architecture largely concentrates on functional problem-solving, with limited attention given to perception and experience from a humanistic perspective. A key difficulty lies in the unique spatial characteristics of sports architecture and the abstractness and ambiguity of perceptual and experiential processes. To address this gap, this study incorporated spatial perception psychological process to develop a subject-object mapping, structured theoretical framework. On this basis, a perception and experience-oriented evaluation system is established and applied to three Shanghai sports venues. Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation and field research combined with Importance-Performance Analysis are used to verify its applicability. The results indicate that enhancing user experience is most effectively achieved through a balanced distribution of diverse, non-profit sports courts, greenery layouts aligned with human perception and circulation ranges, and prioritizing facade transparency. This study provides an evidence-based and user-centered framework for diagnosing and improving the spatial qualities of sports architecture, thereby supporting more informed decision-making in design practice.