The new Cowboys Stadium opens Saturday with George Strait instead of Tony Romo, a substitution that says a lot about sports architecture these days.
On March 10, 2008, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, joined by officials and coaches from Texas A&M University and the University of Arkansas (Jones’ alma mater), announced that the two schools would renew their rivalry with annual games at the stadium, beginning October 3, 2009. In addition, the Cotton Bowl will be moved to the stadium once it opens.
Those days are over. The cost of new stadiums is soaring – the average is now roughly $600 million, and the Cowboys’ $1.15 billion tab is the biggest in NFL history. And so is the pressure to fill every seat on every available date with something, anything: rock concerts, rodeos, revivals, demolition derbies.
To paraphrase Le Corbusier’s maxim about modern houses as “machines for living,” modern stadiums have become machines for playing, part of a year-round, nonstop popular entertainment whirl in which a football game is just one option among many.
Before the first kickoff, it is difficult to say how well the new stadium will work, though a recent preview tour suggests that, despite Jones’ pledge of a “quality experience for every fan,” those in the top deck will be a long way from the action, making the 159-by-71-foot hovering video scoreboard more necessity than luxury. By monumentalizing every bloody nose and late hit down on the field, it may serve as an electronic proxy for lost intimacy.
Fortunately, architect Bryan Trubey has been able to translate this over-the-top program, in which excess threatens to trump excess at every turn, into a fluid contemporary design that belongs to its own time. No retro camouflage like Rangers Ballpark in Arlington or American Airlines Center. No cheap nostalgia.
The stadium is easily the best of the current crop: more open and accessible than the Arizona Cardinals’ home in Phoenix, more rational than the hapless renovation of Soldier Field in Chicago and more immediately engaging than Trubey’s new stadium for the Indianapolis Colts, which has some of the dour industrial qualities of the oil company it’s named for.
Measuring 160 feet wide and 72 feet tall (11,520 sq. feet), the high-definition television screen at Cowboys Stadium is the world’s largest.
Neven Middlesby has been a fan of the Dallas Cowboys for over three decades. He has a blog that is about the dallas cowboys stadium and plans on attending every game the Cowboys compete in. He plans to blog about each game at the new dallas cowboys stadium.
