An Ambitious Plan

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/architecture/la--et-cm-inglewood-stadium-design-20160208-column.html

Rendering of Rams Stadium
Inglewood, California
nextstl.com

Hello Everyone:

It maybe way too early for football but who is ready for it?  Ready or not the Saint Louis Rams are leaving Edward Jones Dome, their home in Saint Louis, Missouri and returning to Los Angeles, California.  After a secret ballot vote by the National Football League's owners,   the Rams have won the right to leave their aging (Jones Dome is only 21 years-old) and outdated home and come back home.  This prospect has the City of Inglewood giddy with excitement over future game day revenue.  The Dallas, Texas-based architecture firm HKS has been commissioned to build a $2.6-billion-plus sports and entertainment complex, due to open in time for the 2019 season.  In his Los Angeles Times article, "The real challenge for Los Angeles' new football stadium is everything around it," Christopher Hawthorne looks at the issues facing the the complex, vast enough to "join the new Wilshire Grand Tower and a planned addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art," as one of the most anticipated and ambitious projects in local architecture.

"Welcome to Inglewood
jumbullion.com

The proposed stadium will have a seating capacity of 80,000 and will include a "...large, covered plaza, a 6,000-seat performance venue and (eventually) an extensive collection of commercial, retail and residential space."  Ambitious, indeed.  The design of the new stadium will be sunk 100 feet into the ground and covered with a translucent roof, and loads with rather telegenic details.  The proposed stadium to have a look of its own while simultaneously "attach itself to a certain Modernist lineage in Southern California architecture, with a fluid connection between inside and out and an extensive collection of trees and greenery by landscape architect Mia Lehrer.  The real challenge for HKS and Inglewood is to what extent its political class will challenge the Rams and the NFL on the urbanism of the development-i.e. how will it fit into the civic and cultural life of Inglewood instead of becoming one more shiny, introverted Southern California enclave.

Rams Stadium site
dailymail.co.uk

 Christopher Hawthorne voices this concern, "And it's really around the edges that it will ultimately succeed or fail, especially where the fortunes of Inglewood are concerned."  The 300-acre site, owned by real estate developer and Wal-Mart scion-inlaw E. Stanley Kroenke, selected for the stadium is just south of the Forum (former home to the L.A. Kings) and three miles east of Los Angeles International Airport.  It is about as close to a tabla rasa as you can get in the middle of an increasingly dense and expanding Greater Los Angeles.

Part of the site was once the location of Hollywood Park racetrack, designed in the thirties by legendary local architect Stiles O. Clement.  However almost all of it, approximately a mile and a half from Inglewood's struggling downtown, is now cleared and ready for new construction.  The site is, essentially, "the last great empty non-industrial parcel anywhere near the geographical center (unless you count the Dodger Stadium parking lot...)"

AT&T Stadium
Arlington, Texas
attstadium.com

To fill in the space, Mr. Kroenke commissioned HKS, the firm that also designed AT&T Stadium for Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys and a new stadium for the Minnesota Viking, set to open in 2016.  HKS also designed Camelback Ranch in Arizona, the spring-training facilities used by the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox baseball teams.

The Inglewood project is dominated by an enormous roof, "a feature whose unusual geometry gives the stadium as a whole an unorthodox and asymmetrical character."  The roof will be composed of a gridded steel frame inset with massive panels of ETFE, a transparent material a minuscule 1 percent as heavy as glass.  The roof has visual drama and more than just little a bit overwrought.  It cures up to create a large opening on the stadium's western periphery., where a proposed 2.5-acre covered plaza, with a view of an artificial lake.  The dramatic roof will plunge back down the southern edge, linking with the roof of a smaller concert venues before knife-like touching the ground.

View of Rams Stadium roof and man-made lake
lattices.com

  Christopher Hawthorne writes, "The roof will the stadium, the performance venue and the plaza between them to feel as though they are part of a single design."  It will keep whatever rain Los Angeles gets out, it will also make possible for the stadium to rely on natural lighting and remain open to the air along the edges.  The roof will also act as huge billboard, visible to planes landing at LAX, blimps, helicopters, and anyone clicking onto Google Earth.  A "supersize example of exploiting what architect since Le Corbusier have called the sky-facing 'fifth façade.'"  The bonus is the roof should reduce noise  from incoming jets. When the Rams are not using the stadium, it can be made available for other sports events and concerts.

They're back
newslalate.com

This kind of flexibility is good thing because, first, the NFL calendar is short-only eight out of sixteen games are played at home.  Second and more importantly is the uncertain future of the sport.  While television ratings are at an all time high, mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain injury; parents across the United States re-thinking signing their sons up for Pop Warner football, it is almost impossible to think about what role the sport will in the future of American culture.

The proposed stadium holds faint references to the Charles Luckman 1967 design for the Forum in the column that dot the covered plaza.  Mr. Hawthorne observes, "Otherwise it's difficult to think of any local precedents for the HKS design."  Southern California has a rich legacy of stadium design-Dodger Stadium, the Rose Bowl, and the Coliseum-all open air stadiums and less flamboyant.  The proposed stadium's greatest potential, in Mr. Hawthorne's estimation, is the exploitation of "...the grade change between ground level and the sunken playing field."  The majority of the stadium's heft will be pushed down below grade, to keep its profile low and avoid interfering with planes making their descent into LAX.  The path fans will travel to get to their seat will take them beneath the roof, along a series of open-air concourses bordered by trees and plantings, opening up to dramatic views.  The early, yet to be be finalized, rendering show promise along these lines.

Ram owner E. Stan Kroenke
bleacherreport.com

The stadium, the plaza, concert venue, and the 12,500 parking space (mostly on the north edge) will make up the bulk of the development.  Additional construction will include a hotel, residential buildings, commercial and retail spaces, and a civic space along the western periphery.  Although the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is considering the option of extending its new rail link south to meet the complex.  Mr. Hawthorne laments, "...the pity-the absurd reality-of the relationship between the forthcoming stadium and the under-construction Crenshaw Lens is that we are once again facing the prospect of a major landmark and a rail route coming tantalizingly close to each other without actually linking up."  Close but not quite school of planning.

Rendering of the plaza at Rams Stadium
Inglewood, California
abc7.com

Unlike the previously considered site in Carson, the Inglewood location is defined by immediate freeway access by way it is embroidered into the boulevard grid.  The stadium anchors the southwest portion of the large tract of land, covering one square mile, lined by Century, Crenshaw, and Manchester boulevards and Prairie Avenue.  How this stadium will relate to this particular boulevard scale may eventually do more than form the future of Inglewood than how many Super Bowls it hosts.  There appears to be little risk that Mr. Kroenke and the NFL, with so many eyes focused on the Rams's return to Los Angeles, will tolerate.  If anything, this stadium absolutely has to be a show stopping, over the top, well appointed multi-purpose place.

However, what about the housing development planned for the eastern edge or the retail spaces on the southern end of the property?   It is unlikely that they will receive as much attention and investment as the stadium.  We will see what happens next.