Cover Story — September/October 2006

Reinventing a Corridor

Arizona Cardinals build a shiny new nest with lots of moving parts

By Tony Illia

The stadium's double-curved steel skin has vertical glass slits and 10,000 insulated metal pieces. Credit: photo by david sundberg/esto © arizona cardinals

The Arizona Cardinals Football Team has a new home, a stunning steel-and-glass stadium built in glendale, just northwest of Phoenix.

The new venue debuted Aug. 12 when the Cardinals beat the Super Bowl-champion Pittsburgh Steelers 21-13 in an exhibition game before a capacity crowd of more than 63,000.

But the stadium stole the show.
The retractable-roof building with its one-of-a-kind rolling field has generated considerable community buzz, which the team hopes it can use to help shake its longtime losing streak. The Cardinals have had only one winning season since leaving St. Louis for the desert in 1988.

Until now, the team has lacked a permanent place to call its own. Its previous open-air home, Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, meant playing under searing heat for the early part of the season in a half-empty stadium.
"It's a fresh start for us," says Michael Bidwill, Cardinals' general counsel and vice president. "We have a home-field advantage for the first time."

With its new stadium, the team sold out its season tickets for the first time in 18 years and opened its season at home. In past seasons, the National Football League was concerned about the late-summer desert heat and scheduled the team's first few games on the road. Now when it's hot, the Cardinals close the stadium roof and crank up the air conditioning.

The stadium's six-chiller central plant can produce up to 80,000 tons of cool air. Dallas-based TD Industries Inc. was the mechanical contractor, with M-E Engineers Inc. of Wheat Ridge, Colo., as designer.
Cooling the stadium to a comfortable 78° on a 100° day will cost somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. Despite this, the cooling system uses fans that are 12% more efficient than normal air handlers, says Joseph Boni, the stadium's engineering services director.

Stops and Starts

The 1.7-million-sq-ft stadium has 63,400 seats with 88 luxury lofts and seven club lounges and can expand to handle up to 73,000 attendees for marquee events. Credit: photo by david sundberg/esto © arizona cardinals

The stadium almost never came to be. The deal repeatedly stumbled and threatened to unravel with lawsuits, funding challenges and location changes between Mesa, Tempe and Glendale. After initial voter rejection, the stadium's funding narrowly passed in November 2000 as part of a larger countywide referendum.

Next, a planned site in Tempe, just east of Sky Harbor International Airport, changed after Sept. 11 because of terrorist concerns. The stadium was then redesigned and ultimately moved to Glendale, about 10 miles northwest of downtown Phoenix. It officially broke ground on April 12, 2003.

The facility is a private/public venue partially funded by a 1% hotel tax and a 3.25% car rental surcharge. Legislation limited public money for the stadium itself to $266.6 million, with the Cardinals, as tenant, paying $150 million as well as any construction cost overruns. The team, in exchange, retains naming rights as well as game day revenue. Land Strategies Inc., Phoenix, served as the team's representative, with N.W. Getz & Associates Inc., Charlotte, N.C., as onsite project manager.

Hunt Construction Group, Scottsdale, had a $425 million design-build contract that grew from earlier figures due to owner additions that included an upgraded graphics package from Pentagram Design Inc., New York, among other things, says Robert S. Aylesworth Jr., Hunt's executive vice president. The total project investment is $455 million, with infrastructure and site improvements. The Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, which owns and operates the stadium, hired Philadelphia-based Global Spectrum as its facility manager.

"While the Arizona Cardinals are our primary tenant, NFL football is played just 10 days a year," says Herman Orcutt, chairman of the Sports and Tourism Authority's construction oversight team. "It's a first-rate, multi-purpose facility designed for mega-events, from trade shows and rock concerts to NCAA Men's Final Four basketball games and international soccer matches."

The stadium will host non-Cardinals events like a Rolling Stones concert in November, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl and BCS National Championship game in January, and Super Bowl XLII in February 2008.

Room to Spare

The stadium's three concourses are constructed from 25-in.-thick concrete waffle slabs that circle the bowl. Snack bars, restrooms and souvenir stands are scattered throughout. Credit: photo by david sundberg/esto © arizona cardinals

The 1.7-million-sq-ft venue has 63,400 seats with 88 luxury lofts and seven club lounges. It can expand to handle up to 73,000 attendees for marquee events. About 1.1 million visitors are expected during its first year of operation.

The stadium's three concourse decks are constructed from 25-in.-thick concrete waffle slabs that encircle the bowl for column-free viewing. Snack bars, restrooms and souvenir stands are scattered throughout.

The sunken, 152,000-sq-ft concrete floor, embedded with utilities, rests about 26 ft below grade, which meant 860,000 cu yd of excavation.

Kiewit Western Co., Littleton, Colo., was the concrete contractor, with West Palm Beach, Fla.-based Rinker Materials Corp. as supplier.

The 165-acre stadium site, known as Sportsman Park, contains 14,000 parking spaces, 20 acres of turf and an 8-acre grassy strip called the Great Lawn. The 1,000-ft-long sycamore-lined lawn is envisioned as tailgaters' paradise, with a 50-ft-wide promenade.

Markham Contracting Co. Inc., Phoenix, performed the site grading and paving, with ValleyCrest Cos., Calabasas, Calif., as landscape contractor.

The site also has 1,250 shade trees and 30,000 shrubs as well as parking for another 7,500 vehicles on adjacent parcels.

The site design is literally an extension of the stadium building, merging inside and outside in function and aesthetic, says Michael Dollin, a principal with Urban Earth Design, the project's Phoenix-based landscape architect.

Architect Peter Eisenman, with HOK Sport+Venue+Event, Kansas City, Mo., gave the stadium its dazzling look. Eisenman, principal of Eisenman Architects PC, New York, had never done a football stadium before.

Eisenman, Project Architect

The Cardinals, however, were after something iconic, distinctive and appealing. "There are no rules governing what a stadium must look like," says Eisenman, a big football fan. "We worked with the Cardinals to develop a memorable landmark that doesn't interfere with the game."

The building's bulging, uneven shape is loosely based on the barrel cactus found in the surrounding Sonoran desert. Its double-curved steel skin has vertical glass slits for surrounding views. Roughly 10,000 individual, insulated metal pieces sheath the curved venue.

The tongue-and-groove panels, manufactured by Crown Corr Inc., Gary, Ind., connect using adjustable clips to produce a sleek, silvery appearance, complemented by a ring of 21 recessed windows measuring 125 ft tall and 10 to 25 ft wide.

Sexy Structure

The arena's most seductive features are its moving parts, inspired more by technology than architecture. The bi-parting retractable roof is a showstopper.

It is supported by a pair of 700-ft-long, 87-ft-deep Brunel trusses. The 1,800-ton lenticular-shaped trusses evoke bridge engineering as opposed to stadium design.

The trusses are not really trusses at all, says Mark C. Waggoner, senior associate with Walter P. Moore, Houston, the roof's structural engineer. It's actually a combination compression arch and catenary cable working together like a drawn bow without the arrow.

Its unique make-up allows for the slender, elegant struts not normally found in trusses. The Brunels rest atop supercolumns at each corner. The 171-ft-tall, 17.5-ft-wide supercolumns include slots for jacking the trusses into place.

Phoenix-based Schuff Steel Co. came up with the idea of doing a single roof lift to alleviate safety concerns as well as enhance speed and simplicity. It also meant doing less work, including shoring and multiple lifts, shaving about $2.5 million from the budget, says David A. Schuff, company chairman.

Moving Parts

As the project's design-assist steel fabricator-erector, Schuff built the 5,400-ton roof assembly on the stadium grounds. Heavy-lifting specialist Mammoet, based in The Netherlands, was brought in to lift the roof into place during a rainy week in February. The procedure went smoothly, at a 20-ft-per-hour pace.

The 490,000-sq-ft roof contains eight teardrop-shaped Vierendeel trusses for each 185-ft-long-by-285-ft-wide moving panel. It's covered with 100,000 sq ft of translucent fabric produced by Taiyo Birdair, Buffalo.

The moving field tray gives the stadium flexibility for hosting non-football events while making field maintenance much easier. It is the only rolling field in North America. Credit: photo by david sundberg/esto © arizona cardinals

The twin operable panels move from midfield to the end zone for a 242-ft-wide-by-361-ft-long opening. Houston's Reliant Stadium is the NFL's only other retractable-roof venue. Cardinals Stadium, however, is the country's only roof that moves on an incline.

The 550-ton roof panels part at about 5 mph, from 0° to 14° using a 480-hp, 32-wheel cable-driven system that works like an elevator.

"It's our most technically advanced roof to date," says Cyril Silberman, chief executive officer of Uni-Systems, the project's design-build mechanization contractor.

The Minneapolis-based firm also applied its mechanical know-how to the stadium's other star attraction-a rolling playing field. The 234-ft-wide-by-403-ft-long field is contained in a tray layered with soil and sod, steel and concrete.

The 18.9-million-lb, 3.5-ft-deep dish takes about 65 minutes to roll outdoors for sunlight and grooming.
"It was more economical to build a moving field rather than a moving roof large enough for the sunlight needed to reach all of the grass inside," says Brent A. Lief, Hunt's design development manager.
The tray moves over 13 rails using 542 steel wheels, 76 of which are driven by 1-hp motors.

After a field mock-up, however, more concrete and soil were added to withstand vibrations caused by supersized football players. That made the field assembly about 1,000 tons heavier, but the rolling system saved $50 million in capital costs.

It also gives the stadium flexibility for hosting non-football events while making field maintenance much easier-and the Cardinals have bragging rights to having the only rolling field in North America.
The project finished on budget with no claims, Aylesworth says.

"In our history going back to 1898, this will be our first permanent home for the Cardinals," says Bidwill, whose grand-father, Charles W. Bidwill Sr., acquired the team in 1932. Since then, it has been based in Chicago and St. Louis. "We felt like if we're going to do this, let's do this right."