Sports play an important role in America’s society, giving us common moments of celebration, levity and provide a social forum where we can be alone in a crowd, or have an outing with friends and family. Baseball is the most romantic of sports, with its leisurely pace of play, the lack of a clock and the relationship of the team and its city. Baseball parks, unlike other major league sports, do not have set field dimensions, or size requirements, which means that each is unique. The charm of the ballparks of the early 1900’s (Wrigley Field in Chicago, Fenway Park in Boston) is derived from the way the architecture of the park is shaped by the surrounding urban environment, blending in seamlessly with the neighborhood. The recent generation of baseball parks has sought to emulate that contextual imagery by either incorporating elements of the city into the ballpark itself (the B&O warehouse at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the Western Metals Building at Petco Park in San Diego) or using their presence to attract other mixed-use development, often redefining the boundaries of the urban center or creating a new community.
An outlier of this movement is the 1990 Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, one of 3 major cities in the Tampa Bay area, home of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, an enclosed multipurpose stadium – the only one in the major leagues without a retractable dome - surrounding by surface parking, in a region that has grown more international and interesting in the 35 years since this building was constructed in the picturesque oceanside town of St. Petersburg, Florida. The team is a perennial winner, with a consistently competitive club on the field. But the building has no personality or unique features that draw a large fan base, despite the 3.3 million people who live in this growing community. This design studio will explore what architecture and context can do to change the perception of a city and the ballclub. We will look at the last generation of enclosed buildings – moveable roofs, moveable walls, translucent materials, and lighting that make you feel you are outdoors while enjoying a climate-controlled environment. We will study how a large building can fit into an urban context and be a magnet for the development of a vibrant neighborhood. And we will imagine how to create a space that might become the identifying feature of a new ballpark/city landmark worthy of spending one’s leisure time.
This studio is not about sports, but about the role a sports venue can play in creating a sense of place and pride in a city. You do not need to know or care about the game, but have an appreciation and lust for how, through programming, architecture, planning, and design, you can bring people together to create an urban center. Our studio will be divided into 3 or 4 groups of 4 or 3 students each. We will look at three alternative sites in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area: (a) renovation of the existing 1990 dome with development in what is not surface parking lots. The adjoining neighborhoods have a more creative and youthful vibe than when this venue opened 35 years ago, which might translate into a very different scale and type of connection as the town as morphed from a retirement community to a growing urban center, (b) reconstruction of an indoor venue on the existing site with development adjacent to the venue. This will raise the question of whether the location of this large-scale venue might create a better development environment if positioned elsewhere on the property. © an alternate site in Tampa, arguably more accessible than the St. Pete locations, adjacent the burgeoning Ybor City community, and if we have a 4th group, we’ll look at a 4th site in Tampa, which like the Ybor City site, would suggest a denser development. Your work will focus on the urban scale of how to fit a large venue into a development, how an enclosed dome might be a better version of the rotating thing we’ve seen in the last generation of buildings and propose a playful distinguishing entry feature or part of the venue that might become its signature element. As noted previously, it may be a sports venue, but this studio is NOT about the sports component, unless you want it to be!