You may not have heard of Rod Sheard but chances are you're familiar with his work. As head of the world's largest sports-architecture practice, HOK, he is currently working on the new Wembley and Arsenal's new ground and putting a roof on the inner sanctum of Wimbledon, Centre Court.

Sheard has been involved in some of the most distinctive stadia of the modern age, from the Sydney Olympics venue, Stadium Australia (and its attractively scaled-back successor Telstra Stadium), to Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. And Croke Park.

Back in the early 1990s the GAA decided to approach the two top consultancies in the field in order to devise a master plan for the new Croke Park, something to provide the parameters for the design of Irish architects Des McMahon and partners.

At the time Sheard was head of Lobb - the pre-eminent stadium designers outside North America - and it was the first time his company had been asked to work with American specialists HOK. This came about because GAA director general Liam Mulvihill wanted to combine the best of both design approaches.

In 1999, recognising the globalisation of the stadium business, the companies merged.

"Croke Park brought us together," Sheard muses. "It acted as a sort of matchmaker."

Sentiment aside, he is very proud of the stadium he helped to shape.

"I love it. You develop a soft spot for a project. When the covers are pulled back on a project people wonder 'when will that ever be finished?' but before you unveil that, every aspect has been scrutinised and planned. You've thought of all the possibilities.

"Liam Mulvihill (GAA director general) was very much a constant thread running through the whole project. He was very focused and wanted the best for Croke Park. That drive gets the best out of a project."

Although Sheard is in Dublin to address a conference, he is interested in the imminent redevelopment of Lansdowne Road. "We've heard that there might be a competition for the final design and we'd go in for that," he says.

The IRFU venue presents its own difficulties, with a railway line and a river among the boundaries, but this wouldn't be anything HOK haven't encountered before. The Millennium Stadium in Cardiff was built on the site of the old Arms Park.

"It was the tightest site," says Sheard. "We talked through the pros and cons of moving to a green-field site but in the end the only place to build them is right in the middle of the city. To get the capacity (nearly 80,000), we had to turn the pitch and to make things worse the WRU and the Cardiff club weren't talking at the time so we had to build around the adjoining wall."

He and his company are firm believers in the developmental advantages of inner-city stadia. They have watched a small project like the McAlpine Stadium in Huddersfield with a capacity of only 25,000 radically improve local amenities.

It was Sheard who pioneered the accepted historical categorisation of grounds in terms of generations, from the basic set-up of the late-19th century, through the accommodation of growing broadcast audiences to the selling of facilities to all family members. At this stage he believes stadium planners should be looking towards what he terms the "fifth generation".

"It's all about growing cities and using these buildings to help grow your cities strategically, identifying the areas in a city that you might want to grow and using sports-stadium developments to help that happen.

"It's all about the change whereby sports buildings 10 or 15 years ago were seen as a bad neighbour. You really didn't want them in your back yard. Now it's all changed because the perception of them has gone from these concrete bowls that are used 30 times a year with a big chain-link fence for every other day to a thing that's got integrated retail, leisure, residential and commercial facilities plugged into it, around it, part of it.

"Everyone now recognises that it does generate a life of its own. That life is the sort of thing our cities need these days."

Rod Sheard is senior principal of HOK Sport + Venue + Event and will address today's Sports & Leisure Facilities for 2020 conference at Clontarf Castle in Dublin.