The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

After a lengthy architectural discussion about image-making, color quadrants, function following form and dynamic thinking, Earl Santee gets a nostalgic catch in his voice. "I remember sitting in old Tiger Stadium, right next to the dugout, just marveling about how intimate it was, and how loud it was," said the 56-year-old architect, "and I could smell Italian sausages and green peppers and onions cooking in the concourses.

"There's just a spirit in the place, even if no one's there," continued the senior principal for the firm Populous, based in Kansas City, Mo., where Mr. Santee grew up. "It's hard to forget that."

A lifelong Royals fan who took courses as a kid at the Kansas City Art Institute, Mr. Santee has designed 18 Major League Baseball stadiums. In 1992, he and his team came up with Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which started a trend of friendly, open-air throwbacks. In 2009, Populous was responsible for the new Yankee Stadium, whose limestone-and-granite facade recalls the original House That Ruth Built. In early March, the Miami Marlins opened Marlins Park, a Populous design that is like no other ballpark. It's supremely modern, a flat, white part-sphere with sapphire-blue glass that brings to mind the teeth of a space alien. More than that: With its perfect sightlines to the Bermuda-grass outfield and with hot dogs and Cuban sandwiches for sale throughout the park, it retains that peppers-and-onions ambience.

"They nailed it," said Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins owner who made his millions over the decades as an art dealer. "They had been used to doing buildings and baseball stadiums in a traditional way. This was not a traditional way of approaching a ballpark."

Populous signed on in 2003, the year the Marlins won the World Series. Mr. Santee and his staff began by renting apartments in Fort Lauderdale and Miami, eating at local restaurants and, for nine years, generally becoming part of the community. By 2006, they were leaning toward the site of the former Orange Bowl, in part because East Little Havana, an impoverished neighborhood full of great old theater buildings and beloved eateries, was ripe for an upgrade. Miami, Miami-Dade County and the Marlins ultimately picked the same site, and Populous went to work.

At that point, the architects turned their attention to the ballpark itself. "They all have different ways of how they express themselves," Mr. Santee said. "Some people can't hand-draw very well, but they can do 3-D modeling. Some people doodle. Some people sketch. That's part of the process."

Greg Sherlock, a senior architect, was keeper of the sketchbook. By project's end, it contained 140 pages by several different people, some doodled with felt-tip pen, others painted with watercolors. Eventually Mr. Sherlock drew an abstract sketch that he describes as "nothing more than a swirl of lines" that approximated what a curvy, stadium-size mass might look like, with the Miami skyline in the background and the ocean in the distance.

When Messrs. Santee and Loria happened to be in London at the same time, they met at a Claridge's hotel restaurant. Mr. Santee showed Mr. Loria a book that contained Mr. Sherlock's drawing and others. Mr. Loria, who studied art history in college, liked "bits and pieces" and made a sketch of his own on a napkin. Mr. Santee drew a few things, too.

Mr. Santee shared the napkins with his Marlins project staff of about 35 people. They tinkered in their design labs, working to reconcile the broad art ideas (Mr. Loria was obsessed with Spanish sculptor Joan Miró's colorful surrealism) with ironclad specifications (a retractable roof that would withstand hurricane winds of 137 miles per hour).

Finally, Mr. Sherlock walked down the street from his office to a Hobby Lobby to buy modeling clay. "I started to sort of sculpt," he said. "And it quickly came to fruition in a lot of ways." Mr. Loria's napkin was what Mr. Santee calls "a moment." Mr. Sherlock's clay model was another—it broadly shaped the final design. "Our philosophy is, whatever it takes to get it out of your mind and on the table, do so," Mr. Sherlock said.

While the Populous architects were working on fitting the elements together, Mr. Loria and the Marlins were coming up with ideas of their own. They invited artists to apply for a Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places commission to design a sculpture to loudly celebrate every Marlins home run. Pop artist Red Grooms won with a whizzing, brightly colored sculpture made of water, spinning fish and flamingos. David Samson, the team's president, suggested the two large aquariums that wound up on either side of home plate. "I had reservations: 'How is that going to work?' " Mr. Santee said. "But they have a kind of luminescence to them. They're kind of a calling card."

Mr. Loria crammed the park with art, by Miró and Roy Lichtenstein, and the overall effect of the 37,442-seat structure is both soothingly contemporary and ridiculously over the top.

Economically, the ballpark is a work in progress. Attendance was up 52% by early August, from 18,700 per game in 2011 to 28,400. But none of the nine other teams that built a new stadium during the last 10 years has had lower average attendance in the first year of a new park, according to baseball-reference.com data. And some Miami critics are already fretting that the $515 million park, mostly funded with public money, is turning into a disaster given the Marlins' disappointing play this season.

Mr. Santee's standard for success is different. After a decade of turning himself into a Miamian, he wants locals to see themselves in the stadium. "When you've done so many buildings, that's really the fun part of the job—trying to create different ways to come up with an original idea, where people say, 'That's me,' " he said. "It's for them. It's not something they've seen anywhere else."