What should the future of the US stadium look like?

The American stadium is in retreat.

In all sports, wide bands of unoccupied seats have become a common sight. The reasons for it can be debated – the cost of attendance increases, fans are busier with other forms of entertainment, or many simply prefer to look in a bar or couch than in a stadium – denied. And the teams seem to be running out of ideas to make the stadium atmosphere more appealing.

When the Jacobs Field was opened by the Cleveland Indians in 1994, the latter was crowded with 455 consecutive games between 1995 and 2001, even with an increase in stadium capacity in 1996 due to the huge demand. In 2015, despite a series of many playoff appearances leading to an AHL pennant in 2016, thousands of often unsold seats were removed for the installation of still-used "party games". This story is not unique to Cleveland. Many clubs have actively reduced their number of seats, and while a capacity of over 45,000 was once common, new stadium projects rarely exceed 30,000.

The gap between opportunity and reality is nowhere more clear than in baseball, the sport that offers the most design innovation and capacity to fill, with 30 teams playing 81 home games per year . The non-standard playing field of this sport should result in more unique experiences for fans, but few teams are daring enough to enjoy it.

Meanwhile, the retro-nostalgic trend in Oriole Park's baseball park design from Camtoreore to Camden Yards in 1992 has worsened. A range of familiar materials and small touches of design are found everywhere in new baseball fields, such as brick and stone, bizarre sake angles and historicist allusions to the so-called Golden Age of baseball. While a few stadiums – including the Marlins Park in Miami, to which we will return later – were the subject of a disproportionate convention, it is not difficult to separate a Comerica Park from a National Park or a Great American Ballpark. a Citizens Bank Park.

Meanwhile, the way we consume sport changes. Cities and teams continue to invest billions of dollars in stadium construction projects, but finished products are not keeping up. Architects may be talking about what their designs will do for a team or community, but they do not realize their goals. The teams seem to have lost all sense of adventure. Instead, the design of modern stadiums has reacted to the decline in the number of spectators, instead of improving.

It's a personal thing for me: I'm an architect myself and my love of sports and stadiums is the main reason. As soon as I followed baseball seriously, by the time Cleveland 'entered this new stadium and became one of the most exciting baseball teams, I thought a great stadium design could make a big difference. team. I would fill notebooks with bold drawings that I thought could change the game forever. (I could have saved baseball in Montreal, if only they had listened to an Ohio teenager.) When I made a career in an architect career in a law firm. 39 architecture as a high school freshman and that I saw non-public designs would become Milwaukee's Miller Park, I became hooked.

For now, no one has asked me to design a baseball stadium. But after seeing stage after stage articulate around slight variations of the same model, I take things in hand. It is a manifesto of the design on how we can face the future, dismember the old assumptions and revive a stage for a new world.

Do not just talk about community membership; let the community buy

In 2018, before exploring other projects such as sharing time with Montreal, the Tampa Bay Rays hopefully set up a new park in the Ybor City area of ​​Tampa. In describing the design, the Rays claimed that the place would be "a scene of, for and by the people of Tampa Bay". Community involvement is a common refrain in presentations like this, and the Rays are far from being the first to suggest a closer relationship. with the public. I do not see anything in the Ybor stadium design that suggests it will create one. This is a fairly standard design that is certainly prettier than their current moribund home, Tropicana Field, but does not address fundamentals of fan support.

Fans want to feel like the club has convinced them and a more aggressive fan engagement model could help them to really participate in the club's success. One of the most promising recent trends in North American sport is how football clubs imitate their European counterparts by developing dedicated fan groups. These independent organizations generate enthusiasm and energy in the stadium and ensure that seats remain occupied.

Instead of just accepting and tolerating the fan group model, we will encourage and codify it in the park's architecture by giving fans control of entire parts of the stadium. Rather than designing the seating and the lobby as a finished product, we will propose it as a framework for fan-driven organizations to introduce their own visions.

The main sections of the stadium will only be designed to a minimal level of basic infrastructure, which will give fans a customizable shell, just as a developer can prepare spaces in a new building waiting for tenants. Each group of supporters will be given a facade on the hall and a facade on the ground, as well as a relative freedom to create their intermediate vision. The type and configuration of seats, the mode of distribution of tickets and even concession operations would be delegated to these groups. Soft seats or hard steps? Scrap both for the standing rails? Do you prefer the daily entrances of first come, first serve, or a program that rewards perfect attendance with a preference for seating? It's up to you, the fans.

This would not only give a more diversified and authentic character to the elements intended for the public, but also to ensure that the number of seats is a source of pride for the community. Your group will not want to be the one who can not draw a crowd on Tuesday night, nor the one who can not add something to the game atmosphere. The message would be clear: bring your vision to the ball, but also bring your friends.

Open the doors

The relationship between teams and their urban environment – good or bad – has created some of the most memorable and familiar features of stadium design. Fenway Park's iconic "Green Monster" wall, 37 feet high, in the left field, was created in part as a protective barrier to prevent freeloaders from watching matches from nearby buildings. Wrigley Field's rooftop viewing sections represent the concession (possibly, reluctantly) to this type of visualization. Although these examples date back more than a century, the tension between teams and cities remains.

"Whenever someone will put something in front of our door, it will have a negative impact on our business," said Atlanta Plant Development Chairman Mike Plant in 2016, while highlighting the vast Development project controlled by a team accompanying the relocation of the downtown Atlanta club. to an undeveloped field in the suburbs of Cobb County. It's a business strategy, but it's not a community commitment. The imitation of the community creates a context adapted to its own needs and distances the city from the outside.

We will take a different approach: we open the doors and offer the stadium in the street. Instead of simply using design touches to mimic the surrounding buildings, we will erase the distinction between stadium and periphery and place the backs of these supporters' sections toward the street. We can not have cars in a hall, so a series of pedestrian streets – like those that have been successfully implemented in urban projects such as Las Vegas's Fremont Street, the Kansas City Power and Light District or the Fourth Street Live from Louisville – can park. Smack-dab in the middle of a vibrant and versatile entertainment district, developed with the same open and community-driven process as the park itself.

Can some people get a glimpse of the game without buying a seat? Sure. The club can recover money by renting land to companies attracted by this activity. And, on slow play days, the district can support the stadium by bringing in people who might decide to take a few beer tricks with a beer after dinner at a nearby restaurant. When is the stadium in full swing for a playoff match? The crowd can cross the whole district, greatly increasing the capacity of the baseball stadium.

For once, a new baseball stadium can be an organic part of the city, rather than just echoing it.

Consider all angles

Baseball is not just a product in person; it is also a television product and the design of a stadium should take into account the game that will be seen on the screen. Tens of thousands of people could see a match from inside the stadium, but millions could see it from the narrow view of a handful of camera lenses.

When the New York Yankees opened their updated version of Yankee Stadium in 2009, their attendance was perfectly healthy: more than 45,000 spectators attended a match, occupying 87% of the stadium's capacity, just behind the Dodgers. Los Angeles. The only thing everyone could talk about, though, was all the empty seats behind the marble. The stadium's so-called "Legends Suite", which sells plush seats with private access to the club for the city's affluent supporters, was and remains a cash cow. Having rarely-occupied captain's seats at the park's most visible spot was a terrible face for a franchise that was beginning to look more like a distant luxury brand than a passionate baseball club.

Even beyond this particularly blatant example, the viewer's dominant perspective – that is, the camera view of the stadium's central field – may give the impression that the stadium looks like an attractive destination or mausoleum. sterile. As a young spectator, I loved seeing the hometown crowd visible over the low brick wall behind the Wrigley Field Marble. Conversely, the high white wall of the Minneapolis Metrodome gave the impression that no one was participating in the game. Certainly, teams have every interest in occupying their best seats with people willing to pay extra, but this monetary grab compromises the audience of the television, who sees a muted front or the same group of insightful people (in looking at you, Marlins Man).

Programs like ESPN College GameDay, NBC Today & # 39; huiand countless televised political rallies know what stadium designers often seem to forget: place your biggest supporters in the place of cameras and make their fervor the first thing anyone sees, it's a better television . We will place a row of seatless stands directly behind the marble. Each match will be animated by a lively crowd, refreshed daily through the ticket lottery, rewarding a new group of thrill-seekers with a unique view in their lives.

Destroy the playground

In theory, so rarely in practice, one of the main goals of a baseball team is to win games. Strangely, many new ballparks are working directly against this goal. For many property groups and the design teams they employ, winning is clearly at best a secondary concern.

"It does not hold the noise or fervor of the local team at the same distance as the old venue," said Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera of the new Yankees stadium. his autobiography, The closest. "The old stadium was our tenth man." The new cavernous balloon fields can not contain or concentrate the noise of the crowd, the fans being scattered far from the field and the best seats reserved for companies.

The stadiums to have had in the past noticeable benefits on the ground, almost by chance. The deafening roar of the Seattle Kingdome, on rare occasions when it was full, was magnified by its ugly concrete dome and the fact that fans were practically at the top of the Tiger Stadium in Detroit was a by-product of structural limitations of the time. . The delicate dimensions of the Fenway Park or the small porch on the right field of Yankee Stadium were not motivated by the desire of the architects to have novelties, but by the limits of the available sites.

An active approach to creating an advantage on the field consists of two main elements: one makes competition more difficult for your opponent, and secondly, it is easier to train your team around the dimensions of the park. We will take two approaches to achieve this.

Many current and proposed stadiums have roofs. Whether it is fixed or retractable, a roof offers greater flexibility and ease of use throughout the year. But they are rarely designed with acoustics in mind and this is a missed opportunity. A stadium can not make the crowd more noisy, but can make it appear louder by capturing and channeling the sound deliberately. Carve a roof structure that concentrates the sound directly on the thrower and the batter can amplify the impact of the crowd and make the game much more difficult for the opposing players.

Meanwhile, a team can be built on outdoor terrain – for example, with a team of fly-ball pitchers in a spacious park, or a range of shooters for a small corner porch. It's not always easy to have the right composition for the park you have. Some teams try to change their size each year to speak to their staff, but this creates annoying gaps between the fence and the seats. The seams show, because tinkering has never been considered in the original design.

In my park, it will be.

Although the inner sides of the stadium are fixed and permanent structures, we can open the design to the outdoor field with some permanent elements anchoring a space designed for flexibility. Each year, the outdoor field can be reconstructed according to the composition of the alignment and the needs of the season, while offering fans a new appearance, more intentional than by accident.

Do not just make a park, make a statement

A good stadium is not just a place to play; it's a destination. Countless people have set a lifetime goal of seeing each of the various baseball baseball fields. But while most of the current parks are comfortable and enjoyable places to sip a beer and a football match, fewer and fewer people possess a truly indelible charm, an element that you just need to look at closely, like the ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field or the green monster in Boston. The restored Baltimore & Ohio Railroad warehouse, located behind the right field of Camden Yards, served this purpose as the retro craze for the baseball stadium began, but many parks have adopted faint imitations.

The Marlins Park in Miami is a park that has tried something different. It was described in the design by Jeffrey Loria, then owner, as a place where he wanted to be "different and experimental". "I thought it was time for baseball to break new ground," Loria said in an interview. the Miami Herald Marlins Park has vividly described "a contemporary monument of great gestures". It is beautiful, modern, unique and largely empty. He failed to meet the other points, including engagement with fans and the community. A busy funding process (and some might say corrupted) and several purges of inconsistent sales lists have eroded fan support, and one stadium alone can not solve this problem. What is Marlins Park? made The offer consisted of breathtaking views, sleek, modern lines and a unique piece with local charm: a colorful animatronic sculpture by the artist Red Grooms that was quickly removed by the new team owner, Derek Jeter, at of his purchase of the club in 2018.

Marlins Park may not have attracted crowds so far, but it's the closest model to a modern baseball stadium to set a new era. We go even further. Our characteristic must be so present in the design of the park that no former shortstop owner, as happy as he is, can remove it. The functionality must be the design itself.

Up to now, we have developed our stadium as it stood in the middle of a solid, functional and formal grid system. Now it's time to rip this grid, cutting it in half with a series of walking trails moving in fluid organic patterns. These pathways will subdivide and connect blocks, creating a variety of dynamic shapes, sizes, and residual conditions. These trails can range from the street corridor to roof terraces and even higher to the structures that form the roof structure.

A place to walk can be an attraction in itself, like the Ramblas of Barcelona, ​​the Strøget of Copenhagen, the Green Casting René-Dumont of Paris or the High Line of New York. Give people a convincing walk, and they will come from afar to walk it. A spectacular view of a baseball field will attract players to stay and play at a baseball game, even if you are someone who would not otherwise be interested in baseball.

All gather

Rethinking a stadium is not simply about changing the size of the terrain or the facade materials. It's about getting out of the stadium in which he's been confined for so long. In this conceptual design, we open the doors and integrate the game day experience into an entire neighborhood. We recognize that the game is not a personal experience, and that a well-designed remote product can create fans who will come to the park in the future. We remember that winning is not everything, but that it must be Something. Finally, we combine it to create a bigger and bigger experience, an experience that will attract visitors far beyond the fans.

Would a baseball team adopt this approach? Probably not. Teams tend not to take risks in how they build and fill their parks. The idea of ​​opening a stadium is dramatic in the face of a century of reflection on sporting profit.

Architects, on the other hand, can only do what a customer is willing to pay them, so it's no wonder that so many new stadiums are turning into new clothes on the same beast. Designers should not be absolved, however. The way sports are consumed changes constantly and they can show teams how to create an environment that can evolve with.

A new way of doing things may seem impossible until it's done. Like Camden Yards, an innovative design can usher in a standard. If and when that happens, it will be a whole new stadium for American sports.