From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
A Banal Bowl
Washington's ballpark plan is no architectural home run.
WASHINGTON--Baseball commissioner Bud Selig soon will announce the ownership team for the Washington Nationals franchise. Memo to the new owners: Send the architects who produced the lackluster design for the Nationals' new ballpark back to the drawing board--even if that means having the Nationals spend an additional season at RFK Stadium, the '60s-vintage, multipurpose concrete behemoth Major League Baseball regards as obsolete.
The new 41,000-seat ballpark, to be located about a mile south of the Capitol in what is now a forlorn semi-industrial zone, will be plenty user-friendly, as renderings unveiled March 14 make clear. But with the city pouring over $600 million into the facility, which will anchor development of a 40-acre, mixed-use "baseball entertainment district," the ballpark needs to be much more than that. It needs to be a landmark that will keep the fans coming even when the team isn't doing well. This is famously the case with Baltimore's Camden Yards, where the still-dominant "retro" breed of ballparks originated in 1992.
Klunkily detailed Camden Yards is no architectural masterwork, but fans love its historic downtown site next to a rehabbed old red-brick railway station and warehouse. And they love the way the brick ballpark responds to that setting--with big arches and other traditional architectural motifs, an old-fashioned deep green color for the seats, and great views of the city from the stands.
What we get with the Nationals' current design is a ballpark bowl enclosed by banal buildings with limestone (or precast concrete, depending on budgetary factors) unimaginatively framing vast expanses of glass. Camden Yards is just 40 miles up the highway, and Washington's Mayor Anthony Williams, determined to rid his city of its philistine reputation, wanted something different. (In 2004 the mayor secured a $40 million subsidy for the Corcoran Gallery's failed effort to fund a controversial Frank Gehry addition.) Alas, hizzonner's insistence on a boldly modern Washington ballpark has backfired, with the architects' emphasis on lightness and transparency yielding buildings suitable for a garden-variety airport terminal.
Though the city's Sports and Entertainment Commission was eager to fulfill the mayor's mandate, it needed an experienced architect who could meet a March 2008 target date. So last year it hired--of all people--Joseph E. Spear of HOK Sport in Kansas City, Mo., designer of Camden Yards and other retro shrines. City Council wrangling over the ballpark deal with Major League Baseball delayed the Washington project for months, and that target may be unrealistic.
The Nationals' ballpark site is bounded by South Capitol Street to the west, Potomac Avenue to the south, First Street to the East, and N Street to the north. In Mr. Spear's design, produced in collaboration with Marshall Purnell of Washington's Devrouax and Purnell, there are entrances to the ballpark on each side. The glass expanses and occasional gaps between the ballpark buildings allow enticing views of the stands and concourses from the street. (Not a really big deal on nongame days.) Views of the city and the Anacostia River from inside the park are also emphasized. A cantilevered, ramped structure protrudes from the principal façade along South Capitol Street to offer fans a view of the Capitol, whose dome will also be visible--even after the anticipated new construction in the area--from the upper stands along the first-base line.
The design goes from banal to pretentious at the ballpark's south end, where a triangular volume derived from I.M. Pei's National Gallery East Building is awkwardly appended to emphasize, and indeed exaggerate, the nonperpendicular intersection of South Capitol Street and Potomac Avenue. Hey guys, this is a ballpark.
From Potomac Avenue on the stadium's south side, close to the river, fans ascend to a large, bleak entrance plaza enclosed by the Pei-esque edifice and a broad, curvaceous, glazed façade that follows the ballpark bowl within but is otherwise devoid of scale or interest. Beyond the plaza, the ballpark's architectural envelope is interrupted, theatrically revealing the grandstands' supporting structure to fans climbing a stairway from the avenue. After the intersection with First Street, which will be developed as a shopping venue, the ballpark's eastern exterior consists of low, glazed, anonymous shopfronts that leave the stands' structure exposed above.
The ballpark's north end is hugely problematic. Most people will approach the stadium from this direction, many of them walking a block down Half Street, which will be lined with restaurants, bars and other amenities, from parking garages and the Navy Yard Metro Station. In the current design, two generic multistory parking garages with a ticket office and team store, respectively, at ground level enclose another overblown plaza. The playing field is sunk 24 feet below ground level and, thanks to the absence of grandstands, views into the ballpark are only partially obstructed by a low cylindrical glass structure that will house a year-round restaurant. Architects and planners working on the project hope that money will be found to stash all the parking underground, allowing the garage buildings to be redesigned to accommodate condominiums and offices as well as retail. But the plaza would still be a dead space on nongame days.
Fans lining up at the concession stands along the ballpark's spacious main concourse will be pleased that it offers a clear view of the ballfield from all points save behind home plate, where luxury suites get in the way. (The park is designed to accommodate 78 such suites, along with 4,300 club seats.) Most of the seating is conveniently situated below the main concourse, and there is a picnic area on a terrace above the First Street shops. All very practical and convenient, as one would expect with a Spear design.
Tradition and urban context have become very important to ballpark design since Camden Yards, and that's not a bad thing. Nevertheless, Antoine Predock, working with Mr. Spear, very successfully broke with the retro paradigm at San Diego's Petco Park, where the terraced buildings of golden brown sandstone and beige stucco are separated from the stands by a "canyon" picturesquely crossed by pedestrian bridges and flanked by landscaped patios. Mr. Predock's design is very innovative, yet very Southern California in its palette and feeling for landscape.
The Nationals, however, should hone closer to the retro blueprint. Their ballpark's buildings should be treated as distinct architectural entities, in line with the distinct character of the streets they will face. Façades along South Capitol and Potomac Avenue should be based on a classical model such as the original Soldier Field in Chicago. Not only would such façades be appropriate to the city's classical heritage and the elegant boulevard South Capitol Street is slated to become, but colonnaded pavilions like those at Soldier Field crowning these facades, and perhaps the pair of buildings at the north entrance to the ballpark, would be wonderful urban beacons--exactly what the current design lacks--serving the ballpark entertainment district as a whole.
On First Street, the architects should collaborate with the master planners of the ballpark district, Cooper, Robertson & Partners of New York, to ensure the ballpark's shopfronts fit in. These shopfronts could morph into something funkier, more polychromatic and postmodern, with the grandstand structure exposed above, as in Spear's design. Along the thriving Seventh Street corridor and elsewhere, such juxtapositions of traditional and postmodern architecture have emerged as a conspicuous feature of Washington's downtown.
But the first indispensable step is for the Nationals' new owners to realize that for the ballpark to be the success this city and their franchise require, a merely serviceable facility will not do. This place must be loved.
Mr. Leigh, an architecture critic in Washington, is working on a book about American monuments.
