"Redefining Baseball From the Outside In" in @wsj #miamimarlins

By STEVE KNOPPER

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."

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Ryan Nicholson for The Wall Street Journal

Earl Santee, with a model of Marlins Park, at the Populous office in Kansas City, Mo.

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."

Making Marlins Park

 

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Populous

BE LOCAL: The architects made a point of integrating the look and feel of Miami's skyline into the park, above.

[image]Populous

THINK IN PEN: Earl Santee and Greg Sherlock drew these frameworks of the tree columns that support the roof. 'I have a little book,' Mr. Santee said of his sketching habit. 'I'm just thinking and doodling. It's all pen. I don't usually erase.'

Great architecture review for the new stadium..."A Ballpark that may be louder than the fans - Marlins Park in Miami, Baseball’s Newest Stadium" in @nytimes

MIAMI — After 20 years of retro-style ballparks since the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, nearly all decked out with brick facades and calculated quirks that came to seem as predictable and interchangeable as the old doughnut-shaped arenas, Major League Baseball has its first unapologetic 21st-century stadium.

 Lumbering and dizzyingly white in the Florida sun, the new Marlins Park is an elliptical concrete, steel and glass boulder looming above the low-rise houses and empty lots of the Little Havana neighborhood. With retail on the outside and a public plaza in front, it’s designed partly to gin up some street life. Economic development is supposed to follow — that was the rationale for the public financing that covered most of the $634 million project ($515 million for the park itself) and contributed to the recall of Miami-Dade County’s mayor. Cities are always building new stadiums with the justification that they’ll catalyze the local economy. They rarely do.

At the same time, the ballpark is unlikely to satisfy aficionados of the latest trends in architecture, but it is nonetheless a modern building, with genuine panache, as opposed to another pastiche. Give the team’s owner, Jeffrey Loria, credit. An art dealer, he cares more than most about aesthetics and took a gamble — part old-school civic improvement plan, part marketing strategy — that Miamians will recognize themselves in the stylishness of the place.

He has festooned concourses and stairwells with art, photographs and sculpture. Most fans will no doubt focus more on the grass field, air-conditioning and retractable roof, which slides over the entry plaza onto slender, palm-shaped pillars, illuminated by pulsing lights. Because of the oppressive heat and rain, the roof isn’t likely to be opened for more than a dozen or so games a year, but even when it is closed, there are sweeping views of the city skyline through 60-foot-tall windows.

The challenge now will be filling the park’s seats. With a capacity of 37,442, this is one of the smallest arenas in the big leagues, but Miamians have notoriously stayed away from Marlins games in droves. Mr. Loria and the city are banking, as so many other owners and cities have, that a new stadium can change a team’s and a neighborhood’s fortunes.

Can it? The Miami Marlins, until this year the Florida Marlins, have labored since their inaugural season in 1993 in a 75,000-seat suburban football arena, where the Dolphins play, which can be as much as an hour’s drive from downtown, with lousy sightlines, crippling summertime humidity and no roof. The Miami Herald’s Marlins beat reporter, Clark Spencer, told me on a recent night that he used to pass the time with colleagues in the press booth counting attendance.

“Once we counted 80-something people,” he said, “and that included some confused foreign tourists.”

Mr. Loria, who took over in 2002, argued that it was pointless to spend money on top players without a domed stadium. Detractors said he was blackmailing the city into paying for a new park, meanwhile pocketing revenue-sharing millions from other teams that were meant to go toward a beefier payroll.

But then in 2007, Miami officials consented to a new stadium on the site of the former Orange Bowl, a couple of miles from downtown. The city provided the land and $13 million. Miami-Dade County paid nearly $350 million for the bulk of construction, with the Marlins kicking in $161.2 million. The pliant architecture firm Populous, formerly HOK Sport, which designed Yankee Stadium and nearly every retro ballpark during the last two decades, was hired to do the architecture.

Orel Hershiser, the pitcher turned ESPN analyst, got in first dibs as critic on opening night when, apropos the swooping “Star Trek” curves on the outside, he said that the stadium looked “like a cruise ship had a baby with a spaceship.”

Almost endearingly, when we met, Mr. Loria countered with a few wishful comparisons to the Getty Center in Los Angeles and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. He said the inspiration for the stadium’s electric color scheme, with its fluorescent-green outfield wall, was the palette of the Spanish painter Joan Miró. Public art and native plantings are meant to lend his building’s exterior what might be called an aspirational gravitas.

Inside Mr. Loria has also installed giant reproductions of paintings by blue-chip modernists like Roy Lichtenstein on or near the main concourse, called the Promenade, amid a souk of food stalls hawking $12 mahi-mahi tacos and $14 Cuban sandwiches. Nobody seemed to take much notice of the art the other night, fans clustering instead four-deep before a bobble-head-doll display. But Mr. Loria professed not to care. The goal is a mix of visual distractions.

These include two narrow saltwater aquariums behind home plate, giving off a bright blue glow. The intended spirit is light-hearted. For the same reason that Florida’s hockey team never installed a panther cage in its rink, it’s now clear why no one had put an aquarium in a backstop before. Animal rights activists were traumatized after the team tested the glass with a pitching machine.

The game aside, the main attraction is clearly the kinetic sculpture by the Pop maestro of kitsch, Red Grooms, in left-center field: marlins spin, flamingos flap and water splashes whenever a Marlin hits a homer. Miamians have been competing to come up with a name for it (the Marlinator and the Marlinstrosity are two, so far). This over-the-top gizmo is to the Mets’ homely home-run apple what the video game Call of Duty is to a jack-in-the-box. Considering how few homers have been hit so far, the fences might need to be brought in before too long to make sure it is exercised.

Mr. Hershiser was close to the mark about the architecture. Stadiums these days emulate cruise ships. They’ve got their first-class cabins and exclusive restaurants and nightclubs. (The one at Marlins Park even has a swimming pool.)

The game is no longer necessarily the point for many people who buy a ticket. Baseball used to be a sport of reverie, with the murmur of the crowd, the chatter of announcers on transistor radios and the crack of bats. Now parks are entertainment palaces, telling us when to cheer and selling us overpriced food and merchandise. The longest line I saw on the Promenade was to get into the team’s souvenir store.

Retro stadiums catered to nostalgia for an era before steroids and artificial turf, but even the past gets old. Fans may someday come to long for the doughnut stadiums. I almost miss Shea. Whether the tropical colors and aquariums at Marlins Park will appeal to local Latino fans, on whom Miami is relying to fill most of the seats, or play to outsiders’ clichés of the city, time will tell.

Sightlines are good. Those at the top and behind the outfield fences feel close to the action, and field-level seats benefit from the narrow foul territory. With the roof closed, Marlins Park is chilled to a dry 75 degrees, a family-friendly environment in which to pass a hot summer day or night. Angled walls and cantilevered ramps on the building’s outside create a few elegant geometries, and multicolored tiles provide decorative pizzazz. It’s more than what you find in the grim concrete corridors of Yankee Stadium.

Yes, baseball isn’t what it used to be — the modern game panders to the corporations and rich patrons who buy luxury boxes and seats behind home plate. But stadiums are about as close as many cities come today to creating large-scale public spaces. They attract untold numbers of fans who might never have gone to a game back when baseball was played before cigar-chomping men in jackets and fedoras.

“A lot of us weren’t expecting something this nice,” said Adam Brownstein, a 38-year-old native Miamian, who spoke for what seemed like every resident I met.

Ten clubs have opened new homes since 2001. The Phillies thrive in Citizens Bank Park, where they keep winning. Pittsburgh flounders in PNC Park — which may be the most beautiful of all the parks to be built in recent years — because the Pirates are perennial losers.

Now that Mr. Loria has gotten his new stadium, he is doling out big money for marquee players, talking about World Series games played with the roof open, under the stars. Through seven home games, according to ESPN, the Marlins have sold an average of more than 29,000 tickets.

If the Marlins are bottom dwellers in late September, that home-run sculpture may come to seem forlorn, the new team uniforms clownish and the cost of the stadium a renewed scandal.

But that’s then. For now, Miami has reason to cheer.

 

 

via nytimes.com