Post by Logan on Feb 9, 2016 0:45:43 GMT -6
The real challenge for Los Angeles' new football stadium is everything around it
The feints, dodges, Potemkin stadium renderings and extended leverage plays are over. The National Football League — behemoth, cruelly skilled manipulator of cities and printer of money — is officially headed back to Los Angeles.
After a secret-ballot vote last month by the league's owners, the St. Louis Rams have won the right to leave the Edward Jones Dome, a facility frequently derided as decrepit and outdated though it's all of 21 years old, and move to Inglewood. The $2.6-billion-plus complex that the team will occupy there, designed by the Dallas firm HKS and due to open in 2019, is vast and ambitious enough to immediately join the new Wilshire Grand tower and a planned addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as one of the most anticipated pieces of architecture in the local pipeline.
Along with the stadium, which will have a maximum capacity of 80,000, the development will include a large, covered plaza, a 6,000-seat performance venue and (eventually) an extensive collection of commercial, retail and residential space.
The design of the stadium itself, which will be sunk 100 feet into the ground and covered with a sweeping, translucent roof, is full of impressive — and impressively telegenic — touches. It is eager to look like no other football stadium in the country and at the same time 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.
Read more: www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/architecture/la-et-cm-inglewood-stadium-design-20160208-column.html
The feints, dodges, Potemkin stadium renderings and extended leverage plays are over. The National Football League — behemoth, cruelly skilled manipulator of cities and printer of money — is officially headed back to Los Angeles.
After a secret-ballot vote last month by the league's owners, the St. Louis Rams have won the right to leave the Edward Jones Dome, a facility frequently derided as decrepit and outdated though it's all of 21 years old, and move to Inglewood. The $2.6-billion-plus complex that the team will occupy there, designed by the Dallas firm HKS and due to open in 2019, is vast and ambitious enough to immediately join the new Wilshire Grand tower and a planned addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as one of the most anticipated pieces of architecture in the local pipeline.
Along with the stadium, which will have a maximum capacity of 80,000, the development will include a large, covered plaza, a 6,000-seat performance venue and (eventually) an extensive collection of commercial, retail and residential space.
The design of the stadium itself, which will be sunk 100 feet into the ground and covered with a sweeping, translucent roof, is full of impressive — and impressively telegenic — touches. It is eager to look like no other football stadium in the country and at the same time 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.
Read more: www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/architecture/la-et-cm-inglewood-stadium-design-20160208-column.html