Playing sports gave Fred Ortiz the opportunity to graduate from college with a degree in architecture.HKS
The first time Fred Ortiz watched a World Series game at the stadium he helped design, the building held only a fraction of its full capacity. Neither side was the home team but instead were from thousands of miles away. His parents, Mexican immigrants, were there, which salvaged the otherwise surreal experience as Globe Life Field hosted a neutral-site World Series amid the pandemic in 2020.
“As architects, we work so hard to create these buildings and you’re always looking for that ribbon-cutting day or when it’s being used for the first time and you see humans moving through it, and it was just kind of flat,” Ortiz said. “While it looked like a World Series and the two most significant teams were playing, it just wasn’t there for me personally.”
That weird experience made it even more special when the Texas Rangers hosted the Arizona Diamondbacks in Games 1 and 2 of the 2023 World Series at the 3-year-old stadium in Arlington, Texas. Ortiz was planning again to be there, this time with roughly 40,000 Rangers fans cheering on the team’s improbable run to the World Series.
The venue’s moment in the national spotlight has led Ortiz, the global practice director, sports and entertainment, at architecture firm HKS, to more than a few moments of reflection about his life story — an American immigration fairytale.
Those two parents who joined Ortiz at the COVID-affected 2020 World Series at Globe Life Field, Aniceto (now 79 years old) and Teresa (76), left behind solid jobs at a bank and a hospital in Juarez, Mexico, to move across the border in 1969 so that their five boys would have better life opportunities. Fred was the oldest of the five Ortiz boys growing up in a north El Paso cul-de-sac with dozens of other kids in the neighboring houses. They played sports from sunrise to sunset and beat the crud out of each other, smiling and laughing — most of the time — as Fred grew into a star athlete and aspiring architect.
HKS’ Ortiz led the design of Globe Life Field.HKS
Fate significantly intervened in Ortiz’s life story at least twice. He’d always dreamed of being a Dallas Cowboys tight end, and he received a full football scholarship to the University of Texas-Arlington where he studied architecture, the first in his family to attend college. His first year there, in 1985, the school folded the football program and Ortiz could’ve followed the assistant coach that recruited him to Louisiana Tech. But his high school coach, a deep-voiced, Red Man tobacco-chewing former Marine, suggested he focus on architecture. Ortiz dutifully listened.
The second fateful choice occurred about two decades later when Ortiz was in Richmond, Va., working for a smaller architecture firm designing hospitals and justice centers. He was considering moving his family back home to Texas but was alerted to a job with HKS’ Richmond office. He’d always avoided larger firms and was hesitant, but went for it and won the job. Oddly, given his background and utter love of sports, it was his first professional exposure to designing sports venues, a line of work that gives him total satisfaction.
That’s hardly surprising because playing sports influenced Ortiz’s life in so many ways. It gave him the opportunity to graduate from college with an architecture degree, which otherwise would have been infeasible financially. It taught him the kinds of life lessons in high school and college he still shares during Zoom calls decades later. And it’s connected multiple generations of his family tighter together. Both of his twin sons, Marco and Antonio, reached the Power Five level of college football; Antonio played at TCU in Amon G. Carter Stadium, a venue his dad helped renovate with HKS. As Ortiz thought about his father, Aniceto, seeing his son in the TCU jersey with the “Ortiz” name on the back while playing in a stadium he helped renovate, he choked up.
That might happen again during this World Series. Ortiz is nothing if not earnest, and despite bearing the physical qualities of a Dallas Cowboys tight end, he feels his emotions open especially when talking about the past, his family, and his heritage.
Growing up in Texas, the Ortiz brothers (Fred, left, Rick, Christian, Victor and Cesar) became diehard Cowboys fans.Courtesy of Fred Ortiz
“I am proud, especially in times where I’m being asked to talk about my past, it conjures up those emotions,” Ortiz said. “It’s something I rarely talk about, but when I do, it really resonates with me and people have led me down certain paths, and it was me; I had to make the decision to step up and act. I’m not going to be handed anything, and much like my mom and dad, worked really hard.”
Leading the design for Globe Life Field with a team that approached a hundred people on a stadium that cost $1.2 billion was a career highlight.
“He’s a great facilitator of opening up discussion and questions and topics and knowledge,” said Mark Williams, HKS’ global sector director, venues, who has worked with Ortiz for 20 years. “He’s that kind of person that can take a room and get a lot of people to participate, be energized by his energy and take it somewhere. There are not a lot of people that can do that.”
It was Ortiz’s idea to shift the brick columns in left field on the north side of the stadium 45 degrees, instead of leaving them flat to the field as originally planned. That increased the building’s transparency, allowing natural light to flood in (especially when the retractable roof is closed) and created a unique arcaded walkway.
“Inside the building we have this thousand-foot span of arches which is really a tremendous architectural feature,” said Rob Matwick, Rangers executive vice president of business operations. “A very subtle move that paid big dividends.”
Rangers owner Ray Davis told Ortiz at one of their first meetings before a speck of Globe Life Field made it onto a piece of paper that he wanted a stadium that felt like it would be in the backyard, bringing family and friends together. That’s a feeling Ortiz could, and did, capture.
