Architecture Critic Labels Cowboys Stadium Best Of New Breed

Architecture Critic Says Cowboys Stadium "Easily The Best Of The Current Crop"

While at Cowboys Stadium "excess threatens to trump excess at every turn," HKS Sports & Entertainment Group Principal Bryan Trubey, the lead designer on the project, has been able to translate the facility "into a fluid contemporary design that belongs to its own time," according to architecture critic David Dillon of the DALLAS MORNING NEWS. The stadium is a "sleek, streamlined oval, part spaceship and part abstracted football," and it is "easily the best of the current crop: more open and accessible than [Univ. of Phoenix Stadium], more rational than the hapless renovation of Soldier Field in Chicago and more immediately engaging" than Lucas Oil Stadium. It is "difficult to say how well the new stadium will work" before the first kickoff, but a tour of the stadium suggested that fans in the top deck "will be a long way from the action." The upper concourses "provide plenty of maneuvering room along with panoramic views of the sprawling suburban landscape," while the lower-level concourses "seem more cramped." Dillon writes one of the "major successes of the stadium is its transparency," as fans have "clear, unobstructed views up, down and across the seating bowl to the not-so-scenic parking lots beyond." The stadium's architects also have "paid more attention than usual to the outdoor plazas," where there are "broad panels of lawn flanked by grassy seating areas with double rows of trees, where fans can picnic before games." And while a "huge portion of the stadium site is parking lots, acres of them," Cowboys Stadium "has presence and pop, extroverted like the team's owner but rigorous and disciplined in its construction and detailing" (DALLAS MORNING NEWS, 6/3).