Nationals Stadium

Not a soccer post. Just a very long rant.

I've lived in the DC Metro area my entire life. A few things go along with that. I expect to run into traffic whenever I go out. It might be 1 AM on a Tuesday, but there might be a five mile backup on the Beltway. I know this and adjust my expectations accordingly. Another thing is diplomatic plates. If I see them, I try to give them a wide berth. I know they probably don't have insurance. If there is an accident, it's on me to get my car fixed even if it wasn't my fault. I think most long time residents have first or second hand knowledge of a fender bender or worse with a car with diplomatic plates. Comes with the territory. A third thing is the tourist, especially at this time of year. I work just off the Mall and at this time of year, the Metros are crawling with high school students visiting DC from all over the country, families seeing the cherry blossoms, and foreigners with their cameras. None of these things bother me. It's part of being a Washingtonian. It would be like a New Yorker hating all the cabs, or someone from Los Angeles hating Hollywood. Doesn't make any sense.

There is something else that is part of being a Washingtonian, and it is The Washington Post. I've read it my whole life. It is one of the dominant papers in the country, maybe number two behind the NY Times. I get it everyday and have my whole life. I love the Sports page. I devour the editorials. However, the Style section is getting on my nerves, specifically the critics: movies, television (except for Lisa de Moraes, love her), and now architecture. If you haven't read the recent review of the new Nationals Stadium, it is a prime example of what really bothers me. So please excuse me while I dissect this review.

It is a machine for baseball and for sucking the money out of the pockets of people who like baseball, and it makes no apologies about its purely functional design...As people circulate through the stadium's public spaces, where beer can cost $7.50 and the cheapest hot dog is $4.50, the human traffic flow unifies the two central purposes of the building: baseball and the fleecing of baseball audiences. This circulating motion wrings money out of you like wet laundry on the spin cycle.

Sorry, the two central purposes of the stadium are to generate income for the owners (and the city by way of taxes on food and tickets) and to provide a place for the public to watch a baseball game. There is no fleecing. To fleece someone is to swindle or cheat them. While the public may be unhappy about their tax dollars being used to build the stadium in the first place, you cannot fleece someone by overcharging them for something they aren't forced to buy. Otherwise, car dealerships would be guilty fleecing anyone who pays full sticker price. If you don't want to buy a $4.50 hotdog or a $7.50 beer, eat and drink before you come to the stadium. And weren't we talking about the design of the stadium?

Although much has been made of its wonderful views of the iconic Washington skyline, it is an inward-focused building, with the field at its center, and rings of concession stands around the edges hiding external views in most places. Even on the inviting open-air corridor of the third level, where people of normal economic means can buy seats without dipping into their kids' college funds, food stalls and bathrooms block what might have been a wonderful view of the Anacostia River.

Really, a baseball stadium is inward focusing? You mean people might want to be able to see the field when walking around the concourse? The game being what they paid to see, I think that a halfway decent argument could be made that it was a choice the designers made to make the field the most important area visitors should be able to see. And how might we accomplish that task? I know, put all the food stalls, bathrooms, offices, and such in places where they won't come between the fans and the field. What a concept. Oh, and we can make specific areas where people who want to take advantage of the location and height of the building can see the beautiful DC vistas, which are viewable for free from the top of the Washington Monument and the Kennedy Center.

The old and much-maligned RFK Stadium, where the Nationals played the past three seasons, might be a better building -- more visual interest, more presence on its prominent site, and a better mix of modern style with the city's vernacular gravitas...RFK Stadium at least looks like a stadium, with a classic shape that recalls noble precursors back to the Roman Colosseum.

This is the most laughable argument the writer makes. RFK reminds him of the Roman Colosseum? On what planet? RFK Stadium was placed in the edge of an established neighborhood which goes back centuries. My ancestors owned a shop about six blocks from the stadium site seventy years before the stadium was built. The Nationals stadium is one of the first building built near the Navy Yard in decades. RFK's presence was "downtown stadium", much like Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. In a baseball configuration, the stands were far from the field, nothing at field level in the outfield, because it was a multi-purpose stadium. Baseball specific stadia look like baseball stadia because form doesn't trump function. A modern baseball stadium puts a premium on getting fans as close to the field as possible. Also, they aren't completely enclosed. The outfield usually opens up to the city beyond for a reason. Football and soccer stadia are usually enclosed because the action can take place at any point on the field. So one corner is the same as the opposite one. At a baseball stadium, seats near the dugouts are clearly superior to ones out by the bullpens. Therefore, the design will be different because the needs are different. Decide on the number of seats you want, in this case just under 42,000, and then put them in the best locations possible, Roman Colosseum be damned.

Although it is positioned on one of the most symbolically significant and potentially beautiful axes of the city, aligned with the Capitol and next to the Anacostia River, it all but fades into the landscape.

A landscape that will be changing dramatically over the next decade. And if you look at the approach from Half Street, I dare you to say it fades into the landscape.

Two disastrously situated parking garages -- reserved for high-paying ticketholders -- obscure the front entrance, and its other three sides present a bland face to the world.

Newsflash, a stadium requires parking. Oriole Park, remember the one with all the presence, has parking structures just outside the stadium. There is also a bland convention center across the street. None of it detracts from the obvious beauty of the stadium. And don't get me started on the off ramps from I-95. Couldn't they have been beautified in the name of aesthetics? What's another $250 million to make the stadium 3% nicer to look at from a few specific angles? Money grows on trees right?

Yet there is nothing particular about baseball, except how it is structured financially, that precludes first-rate, daring and exhilarating architectural form. Ballparks look like shopping malls -- functional, cheap and cluttered with branding -- because the cities that build them are forced to design structures that will maximize the profits of baseball owners. Architectural seriousness is not among the priorities.

This one he has half right, but all wrong. Ballparks are like shopping malls. They are buildings which are made to be visited by the public. Inside them, there are very functional things the public expects, bathrooms, food, signs, elevators, and escalators. Therefore, if you are looking for similarities, you will see them. However, Macy's isn't going to build a pitching mound in the middle of it's men's department and the Nationals aren't going to be building a movie theater in center field. And the exterioirs are somewhat similar because what's important happens inside, so therefore, the focus and the money was spent there.

And so the dreary list goes on. The interior spaces, accessible only to the public that can afford more expensive seats, are covered in carpeting that looks as if it came out of a Courtyard by Marriott. The private boxes are so generic in their fittings and finish, they remind one of the inside of a recreational vehicle. Look out of one of the elevator lobbies on the top ring and you see the exposed mechanicals on the roof of the team's corporate offices, a forest of metal junk.

What a wity line. Courtyard by Marriott. Brilliant. Wait, I'm never going to see the inside of a Presidential Suite. What do I care if the fittings and finish are bland? And where exactly are the mechanicals supposed to be located? Ground level? Here's an idea, take a look at the tops of any other building in the DC area and tell me if the air conditioners aren't located on the top of the building. And he's worried about the view from the elevator lobby on the top level. God, this guy is an idiot.

All that for $611 million in public money. We have been trained to treat our sports teams, the industry behind them and the architecture that contains them with a grim sense of fatalism. Of course stadiums must be bigger. Of course the social space of an egalitarian sport will be distorted into a rigorous hierarchy of wealth and exclusivity. Of course the building will be crude and functional and inspire no one from the outside.

This is a medium sized stadium, around 10,000 seats smaller than RFK. For bigger is better, go bother Dan Snyder.

It is also a colossal symbolic failure with national and international import. At a time when the United States is losing a global argument about freedom and democracy, when China and countries along the Persian Gulf are proving to an attentive developing world that top-down leadership is the best and most efficient route to prosperity, the capital of the so-called free world built a monument to its national pastime that gets a C-plus.

It passes, barely. But as sports lovers know, sports is never just sports. And architecture, especially in a world capital, is never just architecture. Nationals Park might be a better experience than RFK, but it fails to say anything larger to the city, or the world.

"Look people, we are at war. Our stadia need to be beacons of freedom to the rest of the world. If you don't agree with me, you are supporting terrorists. Dictators are the way to go. By the way, I happen to be available for the job should it become open. I would deliver a A+ stadium. Just give me absolute power. I'll take care of making your city beautiful. All it costs you is your liberty." Nice argument. You almost had me. You, Philip Kennicott, are a moron.