<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Under review: A critique of Lucas Oil Stadium Stadium captures Indy's conservative character and reflects its architectural history, critic says. By Lawrence Cheek / Star correspondent Posted: August 10, 2008 Enemies of modern architecture will note with satisfaction that Lucas Oil Stadium, which at first glance resembles a 19th-century factory on steroids, is by every imaginable measurement a better building than the much more progressive-looking RCA Dome it's replacing. The dome is typical American stadium-arena blobitecture -- amorphous, anonymous, disposable. It says nothing about the city surrounding it and offers no welcoming gesture to anyone approaching it. It could be a textbook lesson in modernism's failure. The fascinating question swirling around the stadium as it prepares for its opening, then, is: How have we advanced the art of architecture by looking backward? Or has Indianapolis just lost yardage on a $720 million play? We can start by looking into the architect's mind at the outset. Bryan Trubey, the lead designer for Dallas-based HKS, has nothing in his portfolio that clues us in to his personal predilections. His new stadium for the Dallas Cowboys looks like the offspring of a starship and a titanic mussel, but HKS' Lone Star Park, a Texas horse track, is unabashed Spanish Mission revivalism. On the progressive-architecture continuum, Lucas Oil Stadium lodges somewhere in between. Trubey radiates no starchitect ego, and he sees his role as serving the community where he's working rather than using it as his stage. "This isn't about Trubey's personal brand of architecture," he says. "I've never felt comfortable in creating an expression that's personal to me, then replicating it over and over. It's far more interesting and appropriate to create something completely unique to its time and place. That's a richer field to mine than one's personal experience." Trubey clearly mined Indianapolis' architecture history for the stadium's textures and themes, and not just Hinkle Fieldhouse, the obvious antecedent. Look at St. John Catholic Church, the 1871 Gothic Revival church a couple of blocks north of the stadium: Its arches, limestone-beveled buttresses and shoulderlike bays flanking the nave all resonate in the stadium. Deeper than this, he understood the vast difference between the iconography of a stadium for the Cowboys -- an international brand in a city brimming with swagger and audacity -- and a multipurpose civic symbol for Indianapolis. He chooses his words with apparent care and precision: "I think this building links to the broader culture of the area in a way that a modernist building would struggle to." Mostly good calls It's impossible to know before the opening how well it's going to function as an NFL stadium, a giant NCAA arena or an extension of the Indiana Convention Center. But a great deal of the value, or detriment, of a building lies in how it makes us feel, and we can certainly talk about Lucas Oil Stadium in this light. The first smart decision the architects made was to skew the stadium 24.4 degrees off the north-south street alignment. The reason was to line up the Downtown skyline in the vast north window, but there's actually a more valuable benefit: The colossal visual heft of the building as you walk or drive by is lightened because your perspective on it constantly changes. It seems less oppressive, and oppression is always a prime hazard in a building so far outside human scale. HKS also deployed the full architectural playbook of schemes to break down the forbidding scale of the exterior walls, starting with the brick cladding. However big the building, a single brick is a basic element we can all relate to -- it's scaled for the human hand, and we've all held them. A precast concrete wall, in contrast, always introduces a degree of alienation. The walls are articulated so busily that they're almost fussy. The portal arches are outlined with double rows of radiating bricks, the buttresses step back toward the walls as they climb, and the corners turn in a sequence of vertical accordion folds that help the whole composition feel less like a shoebox. Limestone cornices nicely trim all the pieces. Access ramps, which at this scale can dominate the architecture, are tucked away inside. Study it closely, in fact, and the hulking-factory image dissolves, and it begins to seem as exquisitely detailed and proportioned as a Beaux-Arts city hall. There are some problems. Study the north elevation closely, and you'll see that the colors in the pre-assembled brick panels don't quite match. (The bricks were laid offsite into forms of about 12 by 20 feet, then hoisted into place.) On the south entrance, the architects missed an opportunity to create a sudden sizzle of intimacy inside the arches, which are only about 6 feet deep. If the arches had punched into the lobbies another 10 feet, they would have offered a richer spatial experience in passing from open plaza into the vast indoor spaces. One huge aesthetic debit is the "Lucas Oil Stadium" logo -- chunky, clunky and so overpowering that it tries to suck the energy out of the intimate architectural details. Not the architects' fault, obviously. Inside, you're immediately nailed by the sheer power of vast, enclosed space. It's 295 feet from playing field to roof peak, 846 feet from one end zone window to the other. We get an instinctive rush when we confront such a vast indoor space, because we're seeing that our not-so-humble species has the power to create worlds. Architecture moves us when it suggests that we've surpassed our old limitations, whether in imagination or technology. The most dynamic architectural detail inside is the structure itself -- the exposed bones of the four steel "superframes" at the corners that support the arched roof trusses. Their complexity is a thing of beauty in itself, and the fact that it's not only exposed but so close at hand -- you can nuzzle right up to the beefy I-beams as you walk through the top concourses -- is a way of humanizing the vastness. We feel more comfortable when we can see how something's put together. HKS also has created a remarkably versatile world. It's the only three-tenant stadium in the country, which helps to justify its prodigious price tag and environmental footprint. The opening panes in the north window also enlarge the range of our sensual responses to the space. Peel back the roof and fling open the windows, and we're parked in the world's largest convertible. While we're parked, let's ponder that thorny question posed earlier, the one about the art of architecture. A building to treasure For better or worse, we're into a century in which building technology makes possible virtually anything that an architect's imagination can hatch. Denver now has an art museum that looks like a pile of titanium pterodactyl beaks, London an office building in the form of a 40-story gherkin, and Beijing an Olympic stadium that suggests a giant bird's nest. These buildings are both brilliant and ridiculous, inspirational and outrageously conceited. These contradictions are what make them interesting: They're windows into dimensions beyond the traditional values of architecture. As a civic icon, Lucas Oil Stadium successfully evokes several things: Indy's architectural heritage and essential cultural conservatism, as a foundation. It also projects an image of immense brawn with an underlying matrix of elegance in its proportions and attention to strategic detail. Interesting, because this is how football's ardent advocates might well describe the game. But what about improvisation and brutality, which are just as fundamental to football? What about the inspiration of the region's alternative architecture history, the one that produced Columbus' collection of 20th-century modernism? It's tantalizing to imagine a civic icon exploding with such complexities and contradictions, but we'd better imagine a stadium's practical failure along with them. The inescapable truth is that radical buildings seldom work very well. The art in this stadium may be in the architects' willingness to defy the ethic of it-could-be-anywhere modernism that produced the RCA Dome and try to make a building that Indianapolis will treasure. Stadiums and arenas tumble into obsolescence with preposterous rapidity today, and if one is going to last, it had better be loved. This one has a chance.</div> Source Tacky Promo Video : http://vodpod.com/watch/144221-promo-video...in-indianapolis
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>New home of Colts is ready for football debut By STEVE HERMAN | Tuesday, August 12, 2008 INDIANAPOLIS - It's almost time for football. Except for a few cosmetic touch-ups, the new $700 million home of the Indianapolis Colts is ready to go, and a thank-you party Monday night for some 6,000 construction workers and their families offered a rousing dress rehearsal for the new stadium's grand opening less than two weeks away. The first games in the new Lucas Oil Stadium will be a pair of high school doubleheaders on Aug. 22 and Aug. 23 in Peyton Manning's annual "PeyBack Classic," and the Colts will make their debut in their new home Aug. 24 in a preseason game against the Buffalo Bills. "Basically, it's completed. Other than planting some flowers and cleaning up some elements, all the basic materials are done," said George Sechrist, president of BMG Event Productions, which threw Monday night's bash. "This also gives us an opportunity to test out systems we normally wouldn't get to test. We get to test the food service, the bathrooms, the audio and the video systems," he said. "So all those systems are getting tested tonight as if it were for game time." There was no formal program at the stadium, just food, games and prizes. Lines of workers and their families snaked their way from the entrance level down a twisting maze-like ramp to the field, passing through the Colts locker room and getting a chance to see the 2007 Super Bowl trophy. "It's a way to say thanks to those hard workers, those blue-collar guys in the trenches, girls in the trenches that helped put this together, and it's going to be an icon for this city for the next 30 some-odd years," Sechrist said. The 63,000-seat retractable-roof stadium, which replaces the soon-to-be-demolished RCA Dome as the Colts' home and will host the 2012 Super Bowl, will have another celebration for key customers and sponsors Thursday night and a ribbon-cutting ceremony and public tours on Saturday. Construction on the stadium began in fall 2005, and the most serious problem occurred last month when several downspouts that carry rain away from the roof failed during a storm, flooding the basement telecommunications center. "In order to fix it, the (drainage) system had to be separated, and that alleviated the problem," said Dwight Birdsong, who worked on the stadium plumbing. "I worked on the drains that were installed... and also the storm system. Also, we were in the process of bolting them up, making them tighter, putting more reinforcement on them. "Everything's done. It's ready to go," Birdsong said.</div> Source
