Grass isn’t greener

NEARLY a decade ago, the NFL’s hapless Arizona Cardinals, a team that has posted exactly one winning season since moving to the desert from St. Louis in 1988, hired the New York architect Peter Eisenman to design its new stadium. It was a surprising choice. Eisenman happens to be a huge football fan -- he has had New York Giants season tickets since the 1950s -- but he’s also an experimental architect and a public intellectual who is often more concerned with deep theory than how his buildings work in the real world. It was a bit like Frito-Lay asking Milton Babbitt to write a jingle after finding out that the serialist composer likes corn chips.

The $455-million Cardinals Stadium, which Eisenman, 74, designed in partnership with the corporate firm HOK Sport, opened Saturday for a preseason game between Arizona and the defending Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers. More than anything, it’s an engineering marvel, easily the most technically advanced stadium in the NFL. Its retractable roof, made of panels covered in translucent fabric, is held in place by a pair of 700-foot-long Brunel trusses that rest on 170-foot-tall concrete pillars, giving the interior of the stadium a dramatic sense of scale. Its grass field, as perfectly groomed as a putting green, sits in a gigantic steel tray outside the stadium, soaking up the sun; on game days, in a process that takes just over an hour, it slides slowly inside the dome and locks into place.

Architecturally, however, the stadium never matches that sense of power or daring. That is not entirely Eisenman’s fault: Though sports architecture has become a vital, competitive field in the last few years -- with Frank Gehry, Antoine Predock, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron and other high-design architects working on stadiums and arenas -- the NFL is obsessively protective of its facilities and its image. The league was certainly never going to allow Eisenman to incorporate any design gestures as willfully disorienting as the tilting ramps that slice through his 1989 Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, or the pinched-off interior spaces of his 1996 Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati.

Not that Eisenman was ever really tempted to go that route. “My feeling was that architecture should never interfere with the enjoyment of the game,” he said during a tour of the stadium on Friday. For Eisenman, that qualifies as a dramatic statement of architectural restraint; in the Aronoff Center, to pick the most notoriously user-unfriendly example, he was all too happy to let architecture interfere with the enjoyment of, say, walking to class or finding the water fountain.

The major disappointment of the new stadium, which seats 63,000, is that in the few places Eisenman was given room to work freely, his design is both surprisingly tame and a little muddled. On the facade, for example, he is guilty of mixing his architectural metaphors. The shape of the stadium’s exterior is modeled on a barrel cactus, wrapped in shiny, bulging metal panels and sliced through with a series of glass-enclosed vertical slots.

Eisenman also uses the facade to incorporate a visual riff on Native American sand paintings, which are often spiral-shaped, like a Tibetan mandala. Eisenman’s off-center spiral begins on the roof of the stadium and then circles down toward the ground, spilling onto, and distorting, the barrel-cactus form.

In this architectural mash-up, neither the cactus nor the spiral form is legible in any meaningful way for visitors to the stadium, which would seem to be the primary point of giving the building some connections to regional landscape and culture. And Eisenman’s choice of shimmering metal panels gives the stadium an otherworldly look. Already, fans are comparing it not to a cactus but to a spaceship.

The result, however sleek, is typical of Eisenman’s work, which often employs colliding or fragmented forms more for their theoretical or symbolic value than for the spaces they create. Operating within the profession as a cheerfully radical agent provocateur, he has always been better at rhetoric than architecture.

Very little of that, of course, will matter to Cardinals fans, who are still finding it hard to believe that owner Bill Bidwill has sprung for an expensive new building. (Actually, he has sprung only for about a third of an expensive new building: $300 million of the cost was paid for with public funds.) On Saturday, fans entering the stadium hardly paused to look up at the exterior. After years of sharing the open-air Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe with Arizona State’s football team, they were too giddy at the thought of how cool it was going to be inside the air-conditioned stadium itself, which sits on a nondescript site in the suburb of Glendale, about 10 miles northwest of downtown Phoenix. That sense of wonder hardly dissipated once they got to their seats and took in the pristine grass, the wide-open sight lines and the remarkable way the fabric roof panels filter the harsh desert sunlight -- not to mention the oversized graphics by the design firm Pentagram or the cork floors and plasma screens in the 88 luxury boxes.

Architecture aside, those qualities alone may go a long way in helping the team reverse its sorry history. The Cardinals have already sold all of their season-ticket packages for this season, allowing their full slate of home games to be televised locally for the first time since they moved west. The new stadium will host college football’s title game in January and the Super Bowl in 2008.

The resulting windfall will likely help the Cardinals lure more talented free agents and convince their most promising young players to stick around. (In the off-season, despite a 5-11 record last year, the Cardinals were able to sign Indianapolis running back Edgerrin James, among the top talents on the free-agent market.) For an NFL owner, a new stadium -- with its combination of revenue and media visibility -- is the league’s killer app.

Stadium design is also becoming a significant source of architectural creativity, reversing decades, at least in this country, during which it was ruled by deep-seated conservatism. Baseball stadiums in particular fell victim to a kind of throwback mania throughout the 1990s that was popular with fans but soon, with its brick-wrapped facades and contrived eccentricity, wore quite thin architecturally. Yet in the last few years, seemingly out of nowhere, team owners have discovered that hiring a high-design architect can be create a unique sort of marketing buzz, earning coverage well beyond the sports pages and ESPN.

Indeed, with Gehry working on an arena for the Nets of the NBA, Herzog & de Meuron’s Olympic Stadium set to host the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008 and South Africa building and revamping stadiums for soccer’s 2010 World Cup, sports architecture now stands roughly where museum design did in the mid-1990s, a year or two before Gehry’s revelatory outpost of the Guggenheim opened in northern Spain.

Despite the appeal of Eisenman’s Cardinals Stadium as a place to watch a football game, though, and perhaps for a franchise to reinvent itself, sports fans in this country continue to wait for their Bilbao moment.