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Marlins Park a contemporary landmark of grand gestures and artistic detail
BY BETH DUNLOP
Special toThe Miami Herald
This is a building conceived as a piece of art but intended to house a sport. It’s a huge structure of almost a million square feet — the vast steel-trussed retractable roof alone covers 5.27 acres — that reads as a composition of big gestures. Yet small and precise details abound, and in fact, Marlins Park is the smallest (at least by number of seats, 37,422) in Major League Baseball.
This $515 million ballpark is an intentional landmark, one that looms large even at a distance. It’s imposing in size, dazzling in its shiny bright whiteness and even a bit daunting in its proportions — especially the tall concrete columns that hold up the roof. It sits on the site once occupied by that beloved late white elephant, the Orange Bowl, less than two miles from the heart of the downtown Miami, and city skyline forms a panoramic backdrop over left and center field. On a cool clear day when the roof is open, six of the large glass windows can slide back to allow for an uninterrupted view of the skyline. Let’s hope for lots of temperate weather.
The stadium is a very personal statement for Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, who first discovered architecture and art as a student of Vincent Scully’s at Yale and was from there propelled into a life as a dealer and collector. Loria also remembers the magic moment when, as a young boy, he went with his father to Yankee Stadium (the old one) and walked in from the dingy Bronx street through a dark passage and out onto the brilliantly sunlit field, another life-changing experience.
Thus he asked his architects — from the Kansas City firm of Populous, which has designed some 20 other ballparks among other sports facilities, most currently the London Olympic Stadium — to have the highest of high aspirations. He encouraged them to do something that would be forward-looking and even a bit provocative, the way a work of art often is. “I love the creative process,” Loria said.
Indeed, to hear anyone involved tell it, Loria was a driving force in this design, which pays homage to his longtime love of architecture as sculpture and for the contemporary idiom, as well as his passion for the highly symbolic 20th Century Catalan surrealist Joan Miró. And indeed it is a surreal notion that a baseball team — pitchers, catchers, infielders and outfielders playing what is perhaps America’s most down-to-earth and accessible sport — would be housed in an abstract, contemporary building that pays homage to and is home to major works of art. As you enter, you in fact come face to face with a reproduced Miró tile mural, and elsewhere, you can find outsize representations of works by Kenny Scharf and Roy Lichtenstein.
Unlike earlier generations of city-builders who came to cultivate a subtropical jungle, Loria arrived in a Miami that was rising high along Biscayne Bay and towering over the Atlantic Ocean. What he saw was a more contemporary version of the city, one that would continue to move forward and not reflect back. Loria wanted his building to step away from the usual traditional, nostalgic idiom of ballpark architecture and be “different and experimental.” Which, at least to a certain extent, it is.
That being said, Marlins Park will indeed be a great place to watch baseball, and one needs to be reminded that the primary purpose of this new ballpark was to bring much-needed fans to the field — and evidently with the least amount of discomfort.
The seats have excellent sightlines, and the close-in seats are really close-in, almost like a Triple A ball field somewhere. The concourses and concessions are all open to the field so you won’t miss the grand slam homer or triple play that inevitably happens just when you are paying for your hotdog. The club seats and the suites are as good as can be, but in fact, the plastic seats for the regular game-goer are more comfortable than the pricier leatherette.
So the sightlines are good, the seats comfortable. The Celebration Bermuda grass is a vibrant green (and of course, real). The highly original “home run feature” (which is the term used for the giant, gaudy, goofy artwork that presides over the outfield) designed by pop artist Red Grooms reminds us that we are in Miami, much the way a souvenir snow globe might. It is so kitschy — beyond kitsch really — that it transcends itself. And if you somehow miss the point of the Grooms, though it’s unlikely, right across the field from it behind home plate are two big aquariums, one holding 450 and the other 650 gallons, that are just neon-gaudy enough to prove that sometimes life does seem to imitate art.
Speaking of which, the colors used throughout the ballpark come from the palette of primary colors favored by Miró — red, blue and yellow — with the grass-green of the field as a fourth hue. The stadium is divided into sectors with big swaths of these colors, making way-finding fairly straightforward, and the color surrounds, from outside gates up to the concourse, and includes the mottled epoxy floors, the shiny tiled walls and even the signage on the concession stands.
The colors come close enough to the rebranded team colors (which are an oranger red, a lighter-brighter blue and a strong gold-yellow). That being said, you almost have to know that the Marlins are owned by an art dealer to get the reference (or perhaps, though unlikely, take a cue from the Miró at the entrance). Still, the straightforward organization is welcome.
The team’s colors, among others, show up again in the tiled pathways created — also as part of Miami-Dade’s public art program — by the 88-year-old Venezuelan-born and Parisian-based artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, known for his kinetic op art. It’s entitled Chromatic Induction in a Double Frequency and uses tiny one-inch tiles to form a rhythmic pattern that perceptibly changes as you walk on it and at times almost seems to vibrate.
The building itself is white stucco, raw concrete, aluminum, steel and glass, essentially. As you walk from the outside in you step on concrete pavers that in general are either green or blue — grass or sea — and past landscaping that evokes the beach (there’s even sand) in places. Then there’s more blue — cobalt-colored glass at eye level — that again is intended to reference the ocean (though to be honest, the color is actually more Aegean than Atlantic), then the stucco and concrete of the building, then the paler blue-gray glass at the upper levels (sky?) then the gigantic overarching roof, which when open shades much of the building’s periphery.
At night, the tri-partite columns that hold up the structure will be lighted, but in a way that plays with our perceptions again — another Art in Public Places offering, this one from Miami-bred artist Daniel Arsham and his Brooklyn-based firm, Snarkitecture.
The roof, clad in white rubber to absorb heat and light, will be open only on those days when it is climatalogically and meteorologically appealing to do so (baseball rules say that it can be closed if the game starts with it opened, but not the other way around), which may be fearfully few. Whichever, the interior will be chilled to a comfort level of 75 degrees during games. The building was designed and constructed conscientiously enough to attain a LEED certification, which means it met federal standards for greenness.
As a public-private collaboration, the Marlins provided about 29 percent of the funding and will pay the county $2 million in rent annually. The four adjacent parking garages (also new, and designed by Rolando Llanes of Miami, who incidently was part of the filmmaking team to pay homage to the old Bobby Maduro Stadium, where the first, albeit minor league, Miami Marlins played) are owned by the city of Miami.
Nostalgia and memory do not play a strong role here. If the building dominates its immediate small-scaled, somewhat downtrodden but architecturally interesting neighborhood, the garages and retail along Northwest Seventh Street and at the base of the ballpark go a long way toward mitigating the discord, as do the wide open plazas at the east and west of the stadium building.
There is more. Three mosaic panels from the old Orange Bowl hang on the facade of the southwestern garage, and a few of the old bowl’s plastic seats punctuate a small plaza in front of the parking structure, as a nod to the past. A final public art project, large scale bit-map paintings of children peering through a ballpark chainlink fence, will be installed on the garages next week.
Far less subtle (and triumphant in its form and execution) is the Arsham/Snarkitecture Commemorative Marker: a tumble of 10-foot orange letters that sit upright, sideways, part-buried and flat and spell out both ORANGE BOWL and GAME WON. Or maybe, if you miss the “W,” it says GAME ON.
And it is. On Wednesday, a more momentous-than-usual Opening Day, Marlins Ballpark will be put to its first real test. Loria’s architectural mandate was for both form and function — for one that worked for everyone involved, players to fans to high-rolling sponsors. But he really wanted it all housed in a sculptural building that would stand out among its peers.
Game on. “I thought it was time for baseball to be innovative,” Loria said. Game won.
BY BETH DUNLOP
Special toThe Miami Herald
This is a building conceived as a piece of art but intended to house a sport. It’s a huge structure of almost a million square feet — the vast steel-trussed retractable roof alone covers 5.27 acres — that reads as a composition of big gestures. Yet small and precise details abound, and in fact, Marlins Park is the smallest (at least by number of seats, 37,422) in Major League Baseball.
This $515 million ballpark is an intentional landmark, one that looms large even at a distance. It’s imposing in size, dazzling in its shiny bright whiteness and even a bit daunting in its proportions — especially the tall concrete columns that hold up the roof. It sits on the site once occupied by that beloved late white elephant, the Orange Bowl, less than two miles from the heart of the downtown Miami, and city skyline forms a panoramic backdrop over left and center field. On a cool clear day when the roof is open, six of the large glass windows can slide back to allow for an uninterrupted view of the skyline. Let’s hope for lots of temperate weather.
The stadium is a very personal statement for Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, who first discovered architecture and art as a student of Vincent Scully’s at Yale and was from there propelled into a life as a dealer and collector. Loria also remembers the magic moment when, as a young boy, he went with his father to Yankee Stadium (the old one) and walked in from the dingy Bronx street through a dark passage and out onto the brilliantly sunlit field, another life-changing experience.
Thus he asked his architects — from the Kansas City firm of Populous, which has designed some 20 other ballparks among other sports facilities, most currently the London Olympic Stadium — to have the highest of high aspirations. He encouraged them to do something that would be forward-looking and even a bit provocative, the way a work of art often is. “I love the creative process,” Loria said.
Indeed, to hear anyone involved tell it, Loria was a driving force in this design, which pays homage to his longtime love of architecture as sculpture and for the contemporary idiom, as well as his passion for the highly symbolic 20th Century Catalan surrealist Joan Miró. And indeed it is a surreal notion that a baseball team — pitchers, catchers, infielders and outfielders playing what is perhaps America’s most down-to-earth and accessible sport — would be housed in an abstract, contemporary building that pays homage to and is home to major works of art. As you enter, you in fact come face to face with a reproduced Miró tile mural, and elsewhere, you can find outsize representations of works by Kenny Scharf and Roy Lichtenstein.
Unlike earlier generations of city-builders who came to cultivate a subtropical jungle, Loria arrived in a Miami that was rising high along Biscayne Bay and towering over the Atlantic Ocean. What he saw was a more contemporary version of the city, one that would continue to move forward and not reflect back. Loria wanted his building to step away from the usual traditional, nostalgic idiom of ballpark architecture and be “different and experimental.” Which, at least to a certain extent, it is.
That being said, Marlins Park will indeed be a great place to watch baseball, and one needs to be reminded that the primary purpose of this new ballpark was to bring much-needed fans to the field — and evidently with the least amount of discomfort.
The seats have excellent sightlines, and the close-in seats are really close-in, almost like a Triple A ball field somewhere. The concourses and concessions are all open to the field so you won’t miss the grand slam homer or triple play that inevitably happens just when you are paying for your hotdog. The club seats and the suites are as good as can be, but in fact, the plastic seats for the regular game-goer are more comfortable than the pricier leatherette.
So the sightlines are good, the seats comfortable. The Celebration Bermuda grass is a vibrant green (and of course, real). The highly original “home run feature” (which is the term used for the giant, gaudy, goofy artwork that presides over the outfield) designed by pop artist Red Grooms reminds us that we are in Miami, much the way a souvenir snow globe might. It is so kitschy — beyond kitsch really — that it transcends itself. And if you somehow miss the point of the Grooms, though it’s unlikely, right across the field from it behind home plate are two big aquariums, one holding 450 and the other 650 gallons, that are just neon-gaudy enough to prove that sometimes life does seem to imitate art.
Speaking of which, the colors used throughout the ballpark come from the palette of primary colors favored by Miró — red, blue and yellow — with the grass-green of the field as a fourth hue. The stadium is divided into sectors with big swaths of these colors, making way-finding fairly straightforward, and the color surrounds, from outside gates up to the concourse, and includes the mottled epoxy floors, the shiny tiled walls and even the signage on the concession stands.
The colors come close enough to the rebranded team colors (which are an oranger red, a lighter-brighter blue and a strong gold-yellow). That being said, you almost have to know that the Marlins are owned by an art dealer to get the reference (or perhaps, though unlikely, take a cue from the Miró at the entrance). Still, the straightforward organization is welcome.
The team’s colors, among others, show up again in the tiled pathways created — also as part of Miami-Dade’s public art program — by the 88-year-old Venezuelan-born and Parisian-based artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, known for his kinetic op art. It’s entitled Chromatic Induction in a Double Frequency and uses tiny one-inch tiles to form a rhythmic pattern that perceptibly changes as you walk on it and at times almost seems to vibrate.
The building itself is white stucco, raw concrete, aluminum, steel and glass, essentially. As you walk from the outside in you step on concrete pavers that in general are either green or blue — grass or sea — and past landscaping that evokes the beach (there’s even sand) in places. Then there’s more blue — cobalt-colored glass at eye level — that again is intended to reference the ocean (though to be honest, the color is actually more Aegean than Atlantic), then the stucco and concrete of the building, then the paler blue-gray glass at the upper levels (sky?) then the gigantic overarching roof, which when open shades much of the building’s periphery.
At night, the tri-partite columns that hold up the structure will be lighted, but in a way that plays with our perceptions again — another Art in Public Places offering, this one from Miami-bred artist Daniel Arsham and his Brooklyn-based firm, Snarkitecture.
The roof, clad in white rubber to absorb heat and light, will be open only on those days when it is climatalogically and meteorologically appealing to do so (baseball rules say that it can be closed if the game starts with it opened, but not the other way around), which may be fearfully few. Whichever, the interior will be chilled to a comfort level of 75 degrees during games. The building was designed and constructed conscientiously enough to attain a LEED certification, which means it met federal standards for greenness.
As a public-private collaboration, the Marlins provided about 29 percent of the funding and will pay the county $2 million in rent annually. The four adjacent parking garages (also new, and designed by Rolando Llanes of Miami, who incidently was part of the filmmaking team to pay homage to the old Bobby Maduro Stadium, where the first, albeit minor league, Miami Marlins played) are owned by the city of Miami.
Nostalgia and memory do not play a strong role here. If the building dominates its immediate small-scaled, somewhat downtrodden but architecturally interesting neighborhood, the garages and retail along Northwest Seventh Street and at the base of the ballpark go a long way toward mitigating the discord, as do the wide open plazas at the east and west of the stadium building.
There is more. Three mosaic panels from the old Orange Bowl hang on the facade of the southwestern garage, and a few of the old bowl’s plastic seats punctuate a small plaza in front of the parking structure, as a nod to the past. A final public art project, large scale bit-map paintings of children peering through a ballpark chainlink fence, will be installed on the garages next week.
Far less subtle (and triumphant in its form and execution) is the Arsham/Snarkitecture Commemorative Marker: a tumble of 10-foot orange letters that sit upright, sideways, part-buried and flat and spell out both ORANGE BOWL and GAME WON. Or maybe, if you miss the “W,” it says GAME ON.
And it is. On Wednesday, a more momentous-than-usual Opening Day, Marlins Ballpark will be put to its first real test. Loria’s architectural mandate was for both form and function — for one that worked for everyone involved, players to fans to high-rolling sponsors. But he really wanted it all housed in a sculptural building that would stand out among its peers.
Game on. “I thought it was time for baseball to be innovative,” Loria said. Game won.