Here's the text. I think the inadequacies of the architecture will be lost on most of us. We are interested in a winning season, not whether the roof color matches.
The Arizona Cardinals’ new stadium is a rarity in the world of the National Football League: a work of serious architecture packed with the energy of a coiled snake. Unfortunately, this snake lacks fangs.
Designed by the architect Peter Eisenman in collaboration with HOK Sport, the $450 million stadium is a taut machine whose bulging steel skin and gigantic movable parts fuse a keen aesthetic sensibility with an appreciation for football’s glory days.
The site, a parched desert landscape near the Loop 101 freeway, is appropriately surreal: Eisenman says Cardinals Stadium’s swollen form was inspired in part by the succulent barrel cactuses that sprout across the Arizona desert.
Viewed from the crest of an overpass on the drive out from Phoenix, the stadium first appears as a shimmering apparition, its silvery skin baking in the desert sun. But the dynamic tension will eventually give way to a tame experience, suggesting that Eisenman made plenty of compromises.
Certainly two cultures are colliding here. Eisenman, 73, is one of architecture’s aging bad boys; professional football is about playing within the rules.
That they came together at all is a small miracle. The typical stadium designer today is a corporate servant who churns out formulaic structures, either crudely serviceable or slathered in nostalgic references to the Roman Colosseum. By contrast, Eisenman is an architect who sometimes gets trapped in his own head: he is known for conceptual references that, while playful, can border on the impenetrable.
What got him the Cardinals job, Eisenman likes to say, is that he was the only candidate who could name every member of the Chicago Cardinals’ legendary 1947 backfield. (Eisenman is a longtime football fan.)
But if Cardinals executives took a courageous leap in hiring Eisenman, they were also careful to keep him on a tight leash. In doing so, they forfeited the venomous sting that made so much of his early work so delicious.
The project has repeatedly tripped up and threatened to unravel. Eisenman’s first attempt at a design, a sprawling sports complex sheltered beneath two interlocking boomerang-shaped roofs in Tempe, Ariz., was the most florid he had produced in years. But the project was abandoned when the Coyotes hockey team, which was to share the complex, backed out of the deal. A planned site near Phoenix International Airport was dumped after 9/11, when local government officials began fretting that terrorists might fly a plane into it.
Those familiar with the early renderings of the current design will pick up on some unfortunate last-minute changes. A beige roof has replaced the silvery steel one that would have matched the stadium’s exterior shell and lent the stadium a sleeker appearance. And the vertical slots cutting through the exterior skin were originally intended to cut into the surrounding pavement, rooting the stadium into the site; instead, they end at the base.
Still, the slots create a seductive tension: viewed from different angles as the observer circles around to the parking lot, they make it seem as if the building is pulling apart at the seams.
The arena’s interior, however, evokes 19th-century bridge technology. Muscular concrete columns support the stands. A pair of gorgeous Brunel trusses support a retractable roof; their bowed top and bottom chords are asymmetrical, so that the trusses seem to press down toward the field.
The design’s clarity should allay criticism that Eisenman is lost in a conceptual fog, with little consideration for the little people who use his buildings. The glass slots ringing the main concourse level, for example, are not just part of an intellectual game; they mark the entries into the stadium and offer mesmerizing views of the surrounding valley.
Expanding on the symbolism of the spiral, Eisenman animates the interior by setting it slightly off balance. He routes most of the circulation in the space between the inner stadium’s concrete structure and its exterior metal skin, with elevators shooting up through a Piranesian web of crisscrossing steel braces. The winding form of the exterior shell is echoed in the outline of the retractable roof and in the gray-and-red color pattern of the stadium seats.
But it is the stadium’s celebration of machinery that sets the visitor spinning. In cooler weather, the retractable roof will be opened to allow natural light to spill into stadium. The football field rests in an enormous steel tray set on rails powered by motors so that it can be moved out of the stadium when it is not in use.
The solution is inventive yet wonderfully eccentric. In recent years, softer artificial materials have replaced AstroTurf, with its notoriously brutal impact on the falling athlete’s body. To football purists, there’s still nothing like a grass field, but indoor grass remains extremely difficult to maintain. Eisenman’s solution is to tend the field outdoors in the gigantic steel tray, then slide it back inside on game days. (This also makes it easier to reconfigure the stadium for events like trade shows or rodeos.)
Yet somehow, the visitor rarely experiences the building in a truly visceral, emotional way. Eisenman is not a detail man: he will never match the structural refinement of, say, a Carlo Scarpa, who could transform the connection between a steel handrail and a stone wall into a work of art. His talent lies in expressing conceptual ideas in architectural form.
Clearly, Eisenman had to make painful compromises on this project. Along with eliminating the slots in the pavement for budget reasons, for example, the Cardinals’ cost-cutters jettisoned the idea of continuing the glass slots across the roof. As a result, they look like mere conventional windows from inside the arena rather than incisions that slice through the entire building.
Developers call this value engineering; to architects, it is a form of water torture, in which a design is eroded drop by drop until the original meaning is lost.
What’s more, in a possible bout of cold feet, the stadium owners chose to slather the building with graphics rather than let the architecture speak for itself. Concrete corridors are wallpapered in photos of receivers with outstretched arms. The once-bare concrete walls at one end of the field are now painted a cheerier Cardinal red.
The result is a more timid design than one might expect from an architect like Peter Eisenman. While Cardinals Stadium is a big leap forward for stadium architecture in this country, it is also a strange offspring. From an ornery architect and a culture of macho aggression, we get a polite building.
