KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- When the people designing Baltimore's new football stadium first gathered around the black marble conference table in the architect's offices here two years ago, each brought a specific, and sometimes contradictory, vision of what the building should be.
For representatives of the Maryland Stadium Authority, the stadium had to mesh with Camden Yards' turn-of-the-century brick and mortar. For the Ravens, skyboxes and other money-making accouterments had to justify the move from Cleveland and to keep fans coming to games in an age when free broadcasts are as plentiful as beer commercials.
For the architects, HOK Sports Facilities Group, it was a chance to design the first publicly funded, all-football stadium in a decade. They wanted to define a new state of the art for a sport that has lagged badly behind baseball in stadium design.
But most of all, for everyone involved, the $220 million project had to live up to the toughest standard in sports: its graceful and much-acclaimed green cousin to the north, Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
"We had this incredible success that was sitting next to us which was hammered into us," said James Chibnall, HOK's lead designer of the Ravens project.
"Don't think that didn't keep me up at night thinking about that," he said.
Even though Ravens stadium will dwarf Oriole Park in size and cost, the quaint baseball park in many respects dominated the design of the new stadium.
That much was clear from that first meeting, where participants munched on Kansas City's renowned Gates barbecue and reviewed proposed designs.
Arrayed around the table on the fifth floor of HOK's offices, a renovated, 100-year-old factory in Kansas City's old garment district, were Chibnall, now 37, an energetic senior project designer for the company. He made a splash with Jacobs Field in Cleveland, a forward-looking ballpark that opened in 1994 and reflected his view that merely re-creating old-style buildings was not progress.
Bruce Hoffman was there, too. He is the executive director of the Maryland Stadium Authority and the man who guided Oriole Park to its acclaimed opening. A civil engineer who had previously overseen the construction of state hospitals and other projects for New York state, Hoffman, 50, had hit a home run with his first sports project and didn't want to strike out this time. He was intent on making the new stadium visually compatible with Oriole Park.
Representing team owner Art Modell at the meetings, and the entire design process, was James Bailey. Now 52, Bailey, buttoned-down and bespectacled, has been with Modell and the franchise for 20 years, first as a lawyer, then as in-house executive. He had been through countless failed efforts to wring a new stadium out of Cleveland and had very specific ideas about what a house for football should look like.
Also there were Ronald Labinski, 60, and Dennis Wellner, 48, two HOK founders who had guided the firm from its humble !c beginnings trying to scare up work around the country to its current status as the premier designer of athletic facilities worldwide. It is a status earned, in large measure, from the reception of Oriole Park.
Among them, the group had decades of experience in football and stadium design. But eight more months would be required to assemble all the elements for Baltimore.
A blend of old and new
Although free of the rancor that marked the development of Oriole Park, the process wasn't always smooth. There were disagreements along the way as opinions were melded into a design compromise that blends tradition with modernism, but will satisfy devotees of neither motif.
If the designers have succeeded, the new facility will change the way Americans view football games. Its signature will be its attempt to move beyond the utilitarian drudgery of most football buildings. Elements -- chiefly its gap-toothed upper deck -- have already been copied elsewhere. But whether the stadium will have the same revolutionary impact on its genre as Oriole Park did remains to be seen.
The stadium authority's Hoffman made it clear at the first meeting where he stood.
"It had to be brick, it had to have exposed steel and it had to have reinforced concrete. We wanted this to be a sports complex and to have compatibility" between Oriole Park and Ravens stadium, Hoffman recalled later.
That meant a brick facade and traditional feel -- two elements that hadn't been seen much in football since the great college bowls of the 1920s. In fact, the designers reviewed books of old college stadiums for inspiration.
There was resistance to going too far with this. Some team
officials and architects -- who embraced the heretical view that Oriole Park's turn-of-the-century look was a tad unimaginative -- favored a contemporary influence.
"What do we say when our children say, 'Why did they just build an old-looking stadium?' I don't know how to answer that," Chibnall said.
Football is a different sport, a newer sport, with its own history and aesthetic.
"The cultures of football and baseball demand different architecture. Baseball is a casual sport, played more frequently. Attending a football game is an event that consumes an entire day, beginning with the tailgating," Wellner said.
The shape of things
Initially, the designers considered a horseshoe-shaped stadium with the open end facing north -- toward Oriole Park. This would resemble Memorial Stadium. In fact, the designers went to Memorial Stadium to look at how it worked.
The problem was the sun, which would always be in the eyes of the team receiving on the northern end. Also, eliminating one end zone of seating meant packing more seats in the remaining three sides. That would push them up and diminish the view of the uppermost ones.
By the time of the first meeting, the designers had decided to recommend -- and the participants readily accepted -- an east-west alignment of the park.
Other parameters were also set at the meeting.
Modell wasn't there, but he vowed to build the opposite of Cleveland's 80,000-seat Municipal Stadium -- the oversized and outdated former home of the Browns and Indians -- in Baltimore. He wanted an intimate park, with a capacity of less than 72,000, and one that featured broad concourses and the latest in boutique dining and posh corporate accommodations.
"My marching orders to my people were to make this so special that people would not want to stay home and watch it on TV," said Modell. "I have one philosophy: Today's no-show is tomorrow's no-buy."
He had the right, via the memorandum of agreement that brought the franchise to Baltimore, to veto its design.
Basic issues such as the number and style of locker rooms, video accommodations and press seating had all been thought out by the team over the years in Cleveland, where the team tried unsuccessfully to upgrade its stadium. Other matters, chiefly capacity and the number of luxury seats and suites, were quickly settled.
"We knew what we wanted. We didn't come in like farmers saying, 'Build us a stadium in a field,' " Modell said.
Hoffman was also intent on applying a few lessons from his experience with Oriole Park. For one thing, he hoped the new stadium would prove more adaptable and flexible. Spaces would be reserved for later expansion and remodeling.
"Oriole Park, as great as it is, is very, very tight. There is very little room to do anything," he said.
Surveying the rest
After the initial meeting, the participants went out for a tour of a few stadiums. They started with the Kansas City Chiefs' Arrowhead Stadium, the granddaddy of modern, single-purpose football stadiums. Then the group went on to two stadiums built for the NFL's most recent expansion teams: the Jacksonville Jaguars and Carolina Panthers.
"We got a chance to see different geometry and different ideas," Bailey said.
The team took the best of each, and rejected what it didn't like. The Carolina stadium's field, for example, is big enough for a World Cup soccer game. The Ravens, remembering the country mile that separated their fans and sidelines in Cleveland, rejected this in favor of keeping the seats as close to the sidelines as NFL rules allow.
And Jacksonville's pricey club seat section cuts a vertical swath from the field, between the 40-yard lines, up to the middle of the stadium. The Ravens talked about this arrangement but decided to go with a mezzanine level for club seats, similar to Charlotte and Oriole Park.
With these basic decisions made, construction got under way, based on an outline still being filled in by designers. Gradually, through a series of interlocking decisions, the form took shape.
Tinkering with the design
To accommodate the 108 skyboxes the team wanted, the press level had to be bumped down, below the club seat deck, !B displacing some lower-deck seats.
Quite by accident, this also led to the most dramatic architectural innovation in the stadium, its notched upper-deck corners.
While tinkering with the deck design, Chibnall realized that the skyboxes and club seats and press level were pushing the upper deck up along the sidelines. But this didn't mean the end zones had to rise with it.
So he set them free.
He broke the upper deck into four pieces, long sections along the sidelines and shorter ones overlooking each end zone. He then pushed down in the end-zone sections. This moved these seats closer to the field, improving the sightlines for what are typically the toughest tickets to sell.
It was an inspired notion and, perhaps more than anything else, created the signature by which Ravens stadium will be remembered. Already, stadiums in Cleveland and Cincinnati have adopted variations of the theme.
A major refinement of the idea was offered by Labinski, HOK's spiritual leader, whose office is denoted by a sign identifying him as the "grey eminence." He was looking over Chibnall's shoulder one day while the designer was sketching ideas on tissue paper (Chibnall often does creative work on a drawing board, rather than the computers favored by many colleagues).
Labinski asked: Why not shave off the corners of the four upper-deck pieces to open up the stadium?
He then wandered off.
"One of the unique things about Ron is he's always willing to offer an idea and walk away and let it flower in the designer," Chibnall said.
The effect broke the old rules of football stadium design. No longer would the fans be confined to a concrete oval walled off from the outer world. Now people on the inside would be able to glimpse the urban skyscape around them and passers-by would be able to peek inside.
In a sense, the football stadium would now gain the sort of integration with its surrounding community, or "transparency," that is the hallmark of Oriole Park.
"If you're coming north on Russell Street, you can look right into the upper deck. That's the kind of thing architects drool over," said Steve Evans, HOK's project manager on the job.
It simultaneously solved a number of problems. It brought the capacity of the stadium down to what the team wanted, by eliminating unpopular corner seats. It broke up the crown of the building, making it appear smaller, as Hoffman wanted.
Later, the designers tried another unorthodox approach, this time with the pedestrian ramps that will lead the fans to the upper concourses.
Traditional football stadium design exaggerates the visual impact of these elevated sidewalks, resulting in a building that looks like a parking garage. At Ravens stadium, the designers kept the ramps inside the exterior brick walls. Fans will enter the building through one of the archways and then head up.
"We wanted there to be a psychological sense of arriving in a building. A front door. You are not arriving at a ramp. The building has a sense of grandeur. You go into this building before you begin your climb," Chibnall said.
Early drawings called for pedestrian ramps at each corner. But this was dropped late in the process in favor of a different alignment: one ramp in each of the northern corners, and two overlapping on the center of the south face. In essence, there are three "stairwells."
Using three ramp areas breaks up the symmetry and gives the club lounge on the north side of the stadium, between the ramps, a wide view of Oriole Park and the downtown skyline beyond. On the south side, the lounges were pushed to the corners, giving them views of the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River and south Baltimore instead of a homely warehouse.
The exterior was the subject of much negotiation. Hoffman, representing the traditionalists, sought to maximize the brick and its traditional feel, but wanted to keep the building's scale down. Heidi Edwards, an architect hired by the Ravens, wasn't troubled by the size and argued for extending the brick all the way up the stadium, using brick-framed windows instead of a contemporary-looking wall of sheer glass.
"We want the place to seem big because it is big," Edwards said.
Chibnall tugged toward a more modernistic appearance in keeping with football's relative youth as a major-league sport. He pushed for more glass on the exterior, to break up the scale.
"We came to the compromise of having the brick at the base and skinned it with a curtain wall of glass above it," Chibnall said.
"Our desire was to create this massive base and as your eye went up make it more abstract and blend in with the sky," he said.
Grading the project
How will the stadium be received?
On this the people who met that first day in Kansas City disagree. The designers think it will be influential, but probably not as revolutionary as Oriole Park.
Hoffman says its enduring contribution will be the attempt to dress up the exterior -- contrary to most football stadiums, even those recently opened -- and blend it in with an urban landscape.
"What could come out of this is a football stadium that is woven into the community and is pretty," he said.
Said Evans, who oversaw both stadiums: "I don't think any one project will have the effect of Oriole Park. I don't think you'll see Ravens stadium as an icon. I believe the Camden Yards complex will be an icon."
Chibnall said: "I think it will be very well-received as a building. It's almost unfortunate that it had to compete with Oriole Park. They are totally different buildings and two totally different sports."
Pub Date: 7/10/98