That home-field edge

There were two kinds of projects that modern architecture proved particularly ill-suited to take on during the height of its American influence in the decades after World War II. The first was design at the scale of the city: Modernism and urban planning turned out to be a terrible match, producing towers-in-the-park schemes, hulking expressways and other architectural disasters.

The second was the design of baseball stadiums. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, 17 major-league teams moved into new ballparks. With their strict symmetry and stripped concrete exteriors, the stadiums were full of disdain for the history of architecture -- and of baseball. By the end of the 1980s most of them had become unloved white elephants, sitting forlornly in the middle of lake-sized parking lots.

They fell flat, in part, because they tried to impose Modernism’s utopian formulas on the least utopian of American sports -- a game whose biggest stars have usually been flawed eccentrics and in which failure at the plate two-thirds of the time, extended over the course of a career, will win you a place in the Hall of Fame.

The great exception was Dodger Stadium, which somehow managed to suggest that baseball and postwar architecture were made for each another. When it opened in spring 1962, it demonstrated -- like all of the best midcentury architecture in Los Angeles -- how much could be gained by treating the rigid rules of Modernism more like open-ended guidelines.

The park, designed by architect-engineer Emil Praeger -- with plenty of detailed input from owner Walter O’Malley -- was streamlined and forward-looking. But it also had an unshakable sense of place: Though it incorporated details from baseball’s oldest parks -- particularly the steeply pitched upper decks that keep fans in the cheap seats close to the action -- it was loosely informal and extensively landscaped, taking advantage of its spacious hilltop site. It didn’t take long for Praeger’s stadium to earn a reputation as the best-designed ballpark in the major leagues.

Dodger Stadium’s singular charm -- what makes it work so well architecturally, and why -- is worth examining anew for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the controversial $20-million renovation that the team’s new ownership carried out over the winter, on the heels of a $50-million redesign in 2000.

On top of that, a new wave of high-profile stadium design is beginning to crest. Some of architecture’s biggest talents, including Herzog & De Meuron, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava, are working on sports facilities. And as cities around the world jockey for attention and status, more will surely look to dramatic stadiums as an effective form of global marketing. It even appears possible that stadiums will be to the next 20 years what museums have been to the last 20: architecture’s most dynamic specialty.

The most recent renovation at Dodger Stadium, by the Los Angeles firm Turner Meis + Associates, has drawn fire from sportswriters, season-ticket holders and architectural purists alike. But its scope, at least, is modest. It has added 1,600 premium seats, priced as high as $400, at field level and removed the same number from the upper reaches of the stadium, keeping the park’s capacity at 56,000. It has also attached hyperactive video screens to the facing of the second deck.

According to Drew McCourt, the Dodgers’ 23-year-old vice president of marketing (and the son of owner Frank McCourt), further renovation work is in the planning stages. It will involve replacing the physical seats in every section and may include a long-overdue overhaul of the pavilion seating area behind the outfield. But first the team must deal with continuing fallout from the off-season redesign, which was complicated by the fact that its architects, Dan Meis and Ron Turner, split professionally not long after winning the Dodger contract.

The views from the new seats have been the source of particular controversy, with some season-ticket holders complaining that mostly what they can see now is the person sitting in front of them. But the view of the new seats from the rest of the stadium isn’t terribly distracting.

The only place the design goes noticeably wrong is in the U-shaped concrete semicircle that runs between the new sections and the seats rising behind them; that area, which was added in 2000 and expanded over the winter, is entirely too bulky, as if it shelters some underground bunker where the Dodgers and their wealthiest season-ticket holders can seek safe haven if things get especially out of hand on a $2 Tuesday.

Otherwise, Dodger fans who haven’t been to a game this year may be surprised at how such limited work could have produced such a nasty reaction.

The very strength of that reaction, though, suggests the privileged place that Dodger Stadium now occupies among major-league stadiums. It has joined Fenway Park in Boston, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Wrigley Field in Chicago -- all of which are much older, and all of which have gone through their own remodeling controversies in recent years -- on the list of ballparks so beloved that even the prospect of minor tinkering produces serious anxiety among fans.

Despite Dodger Stadium’s enduring popularity in Southern California, it’s surprising that any park from the dark ages of sports architecture has joined that pantheon. In nearly every other city with a baseball stadium built in the 1950s, ‘60s or ‘70s, the cracks and other signs of aging that Dodger Stadium is now showing would have produced loud calls for a replacement. That’s what happened over the last 15 years in cities from Baltimore to Seattle, as a wave of retro stadiums, often financed with public money, took the place of the postwar ballparks.

For anybody who follows both architecture and baseball, it’s almost impossible not to feel ambivalent about the retro stadiums. To their credit, they brought the sport back to America’s downtowns; some, such as SBC Park in San Francisco, take spectacular advantage of their settings. And because, like Dodger Stadium, they are used only for baseball -- as opposed to the multipurpose bowls so often built in the postwar period -- they are attractively intimate.

But their architecture, with its obligatory arches and brick facades, tends to be not just nostalgic but hackneyed.

Past, present and purpose

In their theme-park approach to architectural precedent, the retro stadiums also offer an example of just how lightly Americans can afford to take their history. In many parts of the world, any place where thousands of people gather -- or can be compelled to gather -- can’t help but become connected in the public imagination with violence and the abuse of power. That much is clear to see in one small but highly charged section of “Structures That Fit My Nature,” an exhibition of work by the 71-year-old Austrian architect Gunther Domenig now at the MAK Center at the Schindler House in West Hollywood.

Aside from suggesting how large a debt Los Angeles architects Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss owe to the little-known Domenig’s work, the show offers a useful corrective to the blithe and sugary historicism American stadium architects have brought to their work in recent years.

Part of the exhibition documents a stark renovation that Domenig completed in 2001 at a former Nazi Party meeting hall and stadium in Nuremberg, Germany, which was built in the 1930s to a master plan by Albert Speer.

Asked to design a space for a new visitors’ center and museum in one section of the stadium compound, Domenig produced a steel and glass addition that pierces one corner of a brick building and comes shooting out the other side. He calls it “spearing the Speer.”

In this country, few firms get the chance to renovate an older stadium and challenge its history or aesthetic character at the same time, as Domenig was able to do in Nuremberg. That’s probably a good thing, given the trouble American stadium architects tend to run into when they mix past and present.

Indeed, one reason Dodger Stadium works as well as it does is that it perfectly sums up the spirit of Southern California in the early 1960s. Los Angeles was at that moment too busy growing and attracting defectors from the Midwest and East Coast to worry about how its new ballpark was tied to the history of Los Angeles -- or of the Dodgers franchise.

In large part, that spirit flowed directly from O’Malley, who was of course an East Coast transplant himself. Something of an architecture aficionado, O’Malley preferred working with designers who were trying to chart new territory.

In the 1950s, when he began thinking about ways to replace Ebbets Field, the Dodgers’ boxy 1913 home in Brooklyn, and keep the team in New York, he corresponded with great modern architects including Eero Saarinen and William Lescaze. He also approached the idiosyncratic designer Buckminster Fuller, known for his research on so-called geodesic domes. The men discussed a domed stadium for Brooklyn, not far from the site where Gehry has designed a proposed arena for the NBA’s New Jersey Nets.

Luckily, a dome wasn’t necessary in Los Angeles, and O’Malley wound up hiring Praeger, who had designed Holman Stadium, the Dodgers spring-training facility in Vero Beach, Fla. That stadium opened in 1953 and is still in use.

In 1956, before building in California, O’Malley took a tour of stadiums, new and old, around the world. From Korakuen Stadium in Japan he borrowed the idea of “dugout” seats that allowed fans to sit in a small section burrowed from the earth, putting their eyes just a couple of feet above the level of the field. (Those seats were replaced in the 2000 renovation.)

The more he traveled, the more O’Malley realized how much would be lost if he and Praeger didn’t take full advantage of their site in Chavez Ravine. So they built the park right into the hillside -- a mammoth engineering and earthmoving exercise, which called on skills Praeger had picked up working for the New York City parks department.

It didn’t come without social costs, of course: As Jordan Mechner’s 2003 documentary, “Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story,” brought back to the city’s attention, clearing the way for the stadium in the 1950s also meant the final death knell for the largely Mexican American neighborhood that once flourished there. (The documentary airs Tuesday evening on PBS.)

Almost immediately after its 1962 debut, Dodger Stadium helped popularize a particularly evocative image of Los Angeles, one filled with palm trees and sunshine and charismatic contemporary design. That element -- that sense of architecture that signals both time and place -- is precisely what is missing in both the failed postwar stadiums, with their sterile universalism, and the retro parks, with their throwback aesthetic.

Metaphors of progress

THE new generation of stadiums now on the drawing boards or under construction is attempting to avoid those earlier mistakes. Their architects, eager to make a statement not just about sports design but also about the hopes of a city or nation, are producing bold if sometimes grandstanding designs.

Many of this new breed are designs for Olympic stadiums, real or hoped-for. Last summer in Athens, Calatrava’s telegenic renovation of the Olympic Stadium helped viewers forget all those stories about Greek tardiness in getting the city ready for the Games.

In New York, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates’ broad-shouldered new home for the New York Jets, to be built on the west side of Manhattan, is the anchor of the city’s bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, though its approval has been in question. London has countered in its 2012 effort with a huge new Wembley Stadium designed by Foster. And before it was cut from 2012 contention, Leipzig was promoting a design by Peter Eisenman, who is also working on an eye-catching new home for the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals.

The current stadium project with which Dodger Stadium has the most in common is undoubtedly the National Stadium now under construction for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. The $325-million stadium, by the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron, is wrapped in twisting steel and resembles a bird’s nest.

That exterior package looks nothing like the terraced parking lots and the soaring roofline at Chavez Ravine. But it’s an example of innovative engineering just as Praeger and O’Malley’s project was. And perhaps more to the point, it represents China’s aspirational confidence in the same way that Dodger Stadium represented Southern California’s in the early 1960s.

Sitting in California and looking west to consider the Beijing stadium, in fact, we can get a pretty good sense of how New Yorkers must have felt gazing toward Los Angeles in 1960: curiosity, cut with low-level dread, at the boldness of what the upstarts to the west were trying to build -- and a rising sense that they just might pull it off.

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Christopher Hawthorne is The Times’ architecture critic. Contact him at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.