Inglewood’s NFL stadium rising soon, hoping to host Super Bowls

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RamBill

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Inglewood’s NFL stadium rising soon, hoping to host Super Bowls

By Greg Beacham, The Associated Press

http://www.dailybreeze.com/sports/2...tadium-rising-soon-hoping-to-host-super-bowls

The 50-yard line is still dirt and weeds around a protruding yellow pipe used for water table measurement. There isn’t much more than vacant space and idle construction equipment within a few minutes’ walk in any direction.

Only birds and far-away jet engines disturb the quiet on a sunny winter weekday in Inglewood, but this spot will be the heart of the world’s next great sports stadium in 3 1/2 years.

And in five years or so, it could be the site of the coin flip before a Super Bowl.

With the NFL season wrapped up in the Bay Area’s Levi’s Stadium, the league’s newest edifice is preparing to rise 350 miles to the south. The largest contiguous block of unoccupied land in the Los Angeles area will be the site of Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s lavish stadium and a massive surrounding complex.

The plan is to build a landmark destination in what’s already one of the world’s most distinctive metropolitan areas.

“From the beginning, Stan’s aspiration for the project has been that this is a legacy project that’s going to be one of the great sports and entertainment districts of the world,” said Chris Meany, the development manager for the Hollywood Park Land Co.

The stadium’s proponents envision Inglewood hosting multiple Super Bowls, the Pro Bowl, the NFL scouting combine, the Final Four of college basketball, World Cup soccer matches and Olympic events. The NFL currently is deciding how much of the development’s 780,000 square feet of office space will be used by the league for everything from its digital ventures to its TV network, creating a West Coast hub for the sport.

The Rams’ architectural renderings and detailed proposal for this football-themed wonderland played the decisive role in persuading the league’s owners to give Kroenke permission last month to move his team out of St. Louis and back to the West Coast after 21 years away.

It also helped that the work had already begun on translating Kroenke’s dream into steel and stone. Construction work has been underway since June 2014, but the official relocation announcement thrilled the people in charge of making the stadium happen.

“Our work hasn’t changed, but, psychologically, I think the weight got a little greater,” Meany said. “I’d like to say it doesn’t matter at all, but suddenly your stomach clenches.”

The Associated Press was granted an extensive tour last week of the site 4 miles east of Los Angeles International Airport. The complex isn’t much more than dirt, crushed concrete, sewer pipe and enormous storm drains today, but excavation of more than 2 million cubic yards of dirt should begin early this summer in a dig that will last through 2016.

Developers say they’re well on pace to open the 70,000-seat, clear-roofed football stadium in August 2019. With 42 months to go before the Rams’ first kickoff, they’re not yet sure how much of the surrounding development will be ready along with it — but a project of this size leaves no time to spare.

“This is one of the most sophisticated sports complexes that will ever be built,” said Meany, a Pasadena native who grew up rooting for the Rams. “The one absolute is that that stadium and its surrounding parking grounds and support network all has to be 100 percent done. Nothing else that we build on site will take as long to build as the stadium will. So while we do not have the luxury to delay any work on the stadium, Stan still has time to decide exactly which ingredients he wants delivered at the same time.”

There is plenty to do in what’s likely to be the world’s most expensive stadium when finished.

The football field is only the centerpiece of a sprawling campus that will include a 6,000-seat theater, about 2,500 residential units, 895,000 square feet of retail space, a 300-room hotel and that extensive office space fronting Prairie Avenue. At least 25 acres of parks, playgrounds and green space — mostly irrigated with reclaimed water in drought-stricken California — will be available to the public on the 340 or so days when football isn’t being played.

“It’s more than just putting up a building,” said Gerard McCallum II, the Hollywood Park company’s project manager. “It’s thinking about how it will integrate with the community. We’re literally in the middle of Los Angeles County, so how do you take advantage of the access to the airport, the beach, downtown Los Angeles and the Westside? The idea is to make this a regional destination center.”

About the only thing that isn’t big is its height. The low-slung stadium’s sail-shaped roof will be just 175 feet above ground, barely taller than the Forum next door and dwarfed by such modern marvels as the Dallas Cowboys’ palatial stadium or the Arizona Cardinals’ futuristic arena.

The 50-yard line is deep in what was once the infield of Hollywood Park, a venerable L.A. institution that hosted thoroughbred racing from 1938 until December 2013. The racetrack’s formulated dirt is gone, but the bare oval and the banks in the surrounding landscape still exist, waiting to be flattened.

Crews are currently crushing leftover asphalt and concrete for recycled use, but the remains of the racetrack were put to a noble use: During the deconstruction of the grandstands and the surrounding landscaping, the development company allowed numerous law enforcement agencies and more than 1,000 firefighters from 110 units across Southern California to do training exercises.

The finish line is still years away, but the people in charge of Kroenke’s Inglewood dream seem confident they’re building something bigger than themselves.

“This is a great achievement here for Inglewood,” said Ken Simeon, the project manager for the construction company doing the stadium complex’s infrastructure work. “I live very close to Inglewood. I’m a California native. It’s great to see the Rams back in L.A.”
 

RamBill

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The real challenge for Los Angeles' new football stadium is everything around it

The massive stadium envisioned for a site in Inglewood is to be sunk 100 feet into the ground and covered with a sweeping, translucent roof. Its complex becomes one of the most anticipated pieces of architecture in the local pipeline. (HKS)

By Christopher Hawthorne

http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...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.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour >>

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.

The challenge for HKS — and for Inglewood, to the degree that its political class proves willing to challenge the Rams and the NFL on the urbanism of the development — will be to knit the project into the civic and cultural life of the city rather than allowing it to emerge as one more glimmering, inward-looking Southern California enclave.

In that sense the planned development is very much a work in progress. While it's fairly clear at this point what will rise in its center, with the stadium and the performance venue tucked beneath that huge roof, the design remains fuzzy around the edges.

And it's really around the edges that it will ultimately succeed or fail, especially where the fortunes of Inglewood are concerned.

The 300-acre site that Rams owner, real-estate developer and Wal-Mart heir-in-law E. Stanley Kroenke chose for the stadium, just south of the Forum and three miles east of LAX, is about as close to an urban clean slate as it is possible to find in the middle of increasingly dense and expensive Greater Los Angeles.

Some of it once held the Hollywood Park racetrack, designed in the 1930s by the legendary L.A. architect Stiles O. Clements. But nearly all of it, about a mile and a half from Inglewood's handsome, low-slung and struggling downtown (and Metro's light-rail Crenshaw Line, also due in 2019), is now cleared and ready for construction.

It is basically the last great empty non-industrial parcel anywhere near the geographical center of Los Angeles (unless you count the Dodger Stadium parking lot, whose redevelopment can only be whispered about).

To fill it, Kroenke turned to HKS, a large and prolific firm that also designed AT&T Stadium for Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys and a new home for the Minnesota Vikings set to open this year. Also on its resume is Camelback Ranch in Arizona, the spring-training complex shared by the Dodgers and Chicago White Sox.

The Inglewood design is dominated by that gargantuan roof, a feature whose unusual geometry gives the stadium as a whole an unorthodox and asymmetrical character. It will be made of a gridded steel frame inset with huge panels of ETFE, a transparent material only about 1% as heavy as glass.

The roof is visually dramatic and more than a little overwrought. It curves up to form a large opening on the stadium's western edge, where a 2.5-acre covered plaza will overlook an artificial lake. Then it plunges back down on its southern end, joining the roof of the smaller concert venue before meeting the ground in a dagger-like point.

The roof will allow the stadium, the performance venue and the plaza between them to feel as though they are part of a single design. It will keep the rain out while making it possible for the stadium to be largely day-lit and open to the air along its edges.

It will also operate as a huge billboard visible to planes heading into LAX, blimps and helicopters patrolling the airspace above the stadium and desktop travelers using Google Earth. It will be a supersize example of exploiting what architects since Le Corbusier have called the sky-facing "fifth façade."

The roof should cut down on airplane noise. And it will allow the stadium to hold concerts and major sporting events like college basketball's Final Four — or some part of the Olympics, should L.A. win the bid for the 2024 Summer Games.

That flexibility is important for a couple of reasons: The first is the relatively small number of events on the NFL calendar: just eight regular-season games every year at home (or twice that if the Chargers or Raiders join Kroenke in Inglewood).

The second is the murky future that professional football faces in this country. The NFL's TV ratings are as sky high as ever, but with mounting evidence of the links between football and brain injury, and parents across the country thinking twice about signing up their kids for Pop Warner, it's impossible to say what kind of role the sport will play in American culture a generation or two from now.

There are faint echoes of Charles Luckman's 1967 design for the Forum in the columns that populate the stadium's covered plaza. Otherwise it's difficult to think of any local precedents for the HKS design. Southern California has a rich history of stadium architecture that includes Dodger Stadium, the Rose Bowl and the Coliseum, but those buildings are open to the sky and a good deal more reticent and refined.

The great potential of the Inglewood design lies in exploiting the grade change between ground level and the sunken playing field. Most of the stadium's bulk will be pushed into the earth, to keep its profile low and avoid getting in the way of planes on their descents into LAX. The paths fans will take to reach their seats, moving beneath the roof and then along a series of open-air concourses lined with trees and plants, could open up dramatic and surprising views. The early renderings from HKS, though not finalized, are promising along these lines.

The stadium, the plaza, the performance venue and about 12,500 parking spaces (most clustered on the north edge of the property, across Pincay Drive from the Forum) will make up the heart of the development. Further construction will add a hotel, residential buildings, office and retail space and a civic square on the western edge of the site, near the corner of Prairie Avenue and Arbor Vitae Street.

Though the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is reportedly weighing the option of extending a new rail link south to meet the complex, the pity — the absurd reality — of the relationship between the forthcoming stadium and the under-construction Crenshaw Line is that we are once again facing the prospect of a major landmark and a rail route coming tantalizingly close to each other without actually linking up. Call it the close-but-no-cigar school of regional planning. See the Gold Line and Dodger Stadium and the Green Line and LAX for earlier examples.

Unlike the other site the NFL had been considering, in Carson, the Inglewood property is defined not by immediate freeway access but by the way it is notched into the boulevard grid. It anchors the southwest corner of the large chunk of land, covering one square mile, bordered by Century, Crenshaw and Manchester boulevards and Prairie Avenue.

How the Kroenke development relates to that boulevard scale may ultimately do more to shape the future of Inglewood than how the stadium turns out or how many Super Bowls it holds.

There seems little risk that Kroenke and the league, with so many eyes on its return-to-L.A. experiment, will allow the stadium itself be anything less than a well-appointed, over-the-top showpiece.

But the housing planned for the eastern end of the site, near Inglewood's existing Darby Park, or the retail buildings on the south side of the lake? It's easy to imagine those elements getting a whole lot less attention, investment and architectural care.
 

Mojo Ram

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I cringe waiting for the stadium to be given corporate naming rights. You know it's going to sound completely sterile and roll off your tongue like a bee sting.
 

Rambitious1

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I cringe waiting for the stadium to be given corporate naming rights. You know it's going to sound completely sterile and roll off your tongue like a bee sting.

I've heard "Farmers Field" mentioned,
Not sure if it's in stone or not.....
 

Roman Snow

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I cringe waiting for the stadium to be given corporate naming rights. You know it's going to sound completely sterile and roll off your tongue like a bee sting.

I hear there is stiff competition between Viagra and Cialis for naming rights. :sneaky:
 

Mojo Ram

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kurtfaulk

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This stadium is gonna be every rams fan's mecca. You have to go there at least once in your lifetime.

.
 

Loyal

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I've heard "Farmers Field" mentioned,
Not sure if it's in stone or not.....
I always thought it was a working name for different LA Stadia projects that never happened, in honor of Sam Farmer..Can't be him though since the naming rights will be big money...So is it after Farmers Insurance?
 

Loyal

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This stadium is gonna be every rams fan's mecca. You have to go there at least once in your lifetime.

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Instead of the hajj....we'll call it the rajj? hmm, that doesnt sing..:puke:
 

wmc540

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I cringe waiting for the stadium to be given corporate naming rights. You know it's going to sound completely sterile and roll off your tongue like a bee sting.

It'd be tough to be worse than National Car Rental Field
 

bluecoconuts

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I always thought it was a working name for different LA Stadia projects that never happened, in honor of Sam Farmer..Can't be him though since the naming rights will be big money...So is it after Farmers Insurance?

It was, the downtown stadium option next to Staples Center had naming rights from Farmers Insurance... It was a huge deal too, like 700 million I believe. They could do that again I suppose, but I'm not sure they will.
 

Rambitious1

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I always thought it was a working name for different LA Stadia projects that never happened, in honor of Sam Farmer..Can't be him though since the naming rights will be big money...So is it after Farmers Insurance?

Yes, that was my understanding.
Farmers Insurance.
 

DaveFan'51

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I cringe waiting for the stadium to be given corporate naming rights. You know it's going to sound completely sterile and roll off your tongue like a bee sting.
I completely agree!! I'm hoping they will name it after a past Ram's Great, like say " Deacon Jones Memorial Park" And leave it at that!!
 

Mojo Ram

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It'd be tough to be worse than National Car Rental Field
puke.gif
 

Rynie

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This stadium is gonna be every rams fan's mecca. You have to go there at least once in your lifetime.

.
Hopefully they keep it about football. Jerry World is an art museum, concert venue, and club that happens to have football games.
 

drasconis

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Hopefully they keep it about football. Jerry World is an art museum, concert venue, and club that happens to have football games.


Not likely, not going to get your money out of it with FB games only....