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 Miller Park introduces Milwaukee to the splendor of engineering pyrotechnics. August/September 2001
Among seven movable North American stadium roofs, Miller Park is the first that's fan-shaped and opens radially, making it the only one of its kind on the continent. It may also be the least obtrusive of the breed, even though when open it's the tallest, at about 330 feet. The Brewers set it in motion at the end of every game, accompanied by music from the sound track for 2001. Fans linger to watch the ceremony, applauding at the end. This is not just local boosterism; there is something beautiful--even mesmerizing--about flve immense roof panels gliding effortlessly overhead to a Strauss waltz. It's not stifiing like Seattle's Safeco fleld, whose canopy is an instrument of darkness. In Milwaukee, natural light fllters in from three directions even with the roof closed. Beyond the outfield, large translucent wall panels open and close with the roof. Under the roof arches along the baselines are nicely detailed window walls that are grand in scale--530 feet long and about 90 feet high at their apex. Their appearance recalls the end of a glazed train shed in a nineteenth-century railroad station--the image designer Dan Meis of NBBJ Los Angeles used when presenting his proposal to the clients. (Other members of the design team were HKS of Dallas and locally based Eppstein Uhen.) Miller Park's great design coup is its manipulation of natural light and the impressive architectural elements that transmit it; of the eight roofed stadiums I've seen in North America and Japan, this is easily the finest in that regard. The structure is also praiseworthy for its deft handling of circulation. There are no pedestrian bottlenecks (unlike the recent Pac Bell Park in San Francisco); it is easy to go between levels via escalator, elevator, or stairs; and the ramps, which can be awkward in other stadiums, are discreet and unobtrusive.
These are Miller Park's greatest strengths--and they are significant. But by their very nature, large American stadiums are imperfect. The design inevitably involves geometric trade-offs, fast schedules, budgets that don't permit refined detailing and fine flnishes, and a dearth of skilled clients. Miller Park, unlike most of the dozen other post-1989 ballparks, occupies a suburban environment of parking lots and freeways. This dates back to the early 1950s, when County Stadium--Miller Park's underrated predecessor--was built near an abandoned quarry. The resulting fan culture became one of sausage grilling at tailgate parties rather than urban synergy. There was political support, led by Mayor John O. Norquist, for locating County Stadium's replacement downtown, but inertia, along with the Brewers' desire to capture maximum parking revenues and stadium spending, led to it being built a few hundred feet away. This may prove to be a poor long-term decision for the Brewers as well as for the city. Attendance data suggest that ballparks in urban settings draw more fans than those in suburbia. The Brewers wanted a new suburban ballpark, but they wanted it to look like an old urban one. About ten years ago, before the final design team became involved, they released drawings of an oversize, Ebbets fleld--inspired exterior, which was later incongruously combined with an even larger high-tech retractable roof. Ever since, the Miller Park project has embodied a basic design confiict between rationality and subjective nostalgia. The roof and the basic building form that grows from its geometry are symmetrical, but the fleld shape and seating patterns inside are not. This tension grows out of a questionable impulse to emulate vanished 90-year-old ballparks and manufacture character and uniqueness out of whole cloth. But old parks such as Ebbets fleld and the Polo Grounds, and the better retro ones such as Pac Bell Park and Baltimore's Camden Yards, earned their identities legitimately through adaptation to site constraints and opportunities, not through self-conscious and arbitrary asymmetry. Miller's fleld and seating patterns not only have no connection to the qualities of its site, but they are also at odds with the structure they inhabit. The outfield fences have a gratuitous quirkiness. They take ten separate twists and turns, supposedly to create better game action, but really for little reason other than to be "interesting." Some of the classic ballparks had as few as two or three outfield wall segments, and none of them had such a voluntary fussiness. Among today's retro parks, the best outfields have three to six wall planes. Likewise Miller's seats angle in various directions, and the number of rows in the upper deck fluctuates quixotically. Some of the angling improves horizontal sight lines, but that doesn't explain the asymmetry--the alignments along the first and third baselines differ, but surely one of them is better for viewing and should have been the standard. The Brewers claim that in designing the new park, they eliminated County Stadium's 10,000 worst seats and then improved on what was left. Not so. Even with a much smaller seating capacity of 43,000, Miller Park's worst seats are further from the action than those of County Stadium: behind home plate, the first row of the upper deck is more than 40 feet farther from the batter. Most new parks claim to be intimate but are usually larger, despite lower seating capacities. This is due to the lavish space devoted to premium seating--the private suites and exclusive club seats--that form the main impetus to build new ballparks. Still, among the 13 newest parks, Miller Park's upper deck is the second worst in fleld proximity. Most new ballparks claim to eliminate obstructed-view seats. In actuality, they may eliminate views obstructed by columns, but other sight-line problems are created because of stair landings, handrails, and upper-deck geometries. At Miller Park, there are also columns in right fleld and in the upper deck behind home plate, and the lower stands block views of the right and left fleld corners from many seating locations. A more rigorous seating design could have reduced these problems. Given the innovative high-tech roof, one might have expected a modern treatment of the exterior, but the Brewers' desire for nostalgia ruled that out. Meis's exterior design is an honorable attempt to walk the line between postmodernism and uncluttered expression--and is most successful in the facade's upper reaches, where glass supplants brick. Seen from outside, the roof is somewhat awkward, especially where its trusses converge in a crowded way at the home-plate end. Its pivot points and drive mechanisms are hidden rather than celebrated. And, like almost all retractable roofs, it is too big and prominent externally compared to the stadium itself. On paper, this detailed recitation of pros and cons may give the impression that the stadium's failures eclipse its successes. But in execution, Miller Park exceeds the architectural norm for a new baseball stadium: the roof arrangement and internal circulation are outstanding, the scale is properly grand, and the skillful provision of natural light is unsurpassed in a covered ballpark. John Pastier is a Seattle-based architecture critic. |
