Design: The House that Ugly Built

Downtown Minneapolis’s misfit stadium has new bells and whistles, but does it make any difference?

Sine it opened in 1982, the only really positive thing anybody could say about the building is that it kept the outside weather mostly on the outside.

Image credit: Bryan Nanista

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By: Phillip Koski |   October 2011   |  From the print edition

A refurbished Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome did not so much leap as it did sputter out of the ashes of old age and misfortune in August, just in time to meet the Vikings’ 2011 pregame schedule. Noticeably brighter inside with nine-and-a-half acres of spanking-new, Teflon-coated fiberglass overhead and shiny new green “turf” underfoot, the roughly $19 million in upgrades prompted several attendees at the August re-opening to remark that the facility never looked better. Really.

The symbolism of the roof’s collapse under heavy snow last December grew increasingly ominous with the unfolding debate in the state legislature regarding building a new stadium for the Vikings—the sole remaining professional sports tenant—elsewhere. Despite the facts that the venue is not even three decades old and it’s paid for (unlike other NFL stadia around the country), the Metrodome gets treated like a houseguest having long worn out its welcome.

Architecturally, that’s no surprise. From the get-go when it opened in 1982, the only really positive thing anybody could say about the building is that it kept the outside weather mostly on the outside. Shaped like an enormous oblong casserole dish and decked out with all the creature comforts of a Minuteman missile silo, the Metrodome never grabbed the imagination of the public the way today’s athletic venues are expected to.  

Built for $68 million, a paltry sum even when adjusted for inflation, the building came in under budget. Even at the end of the economically and culturally demoralized 1970s, Minnesotans managed to set the bar on the ground and crawl under it. While the idea of a roofed and multipurpose sports facility had been kicked around for a good 10 years before gaining any ground, any architectural ambitions for the new structure fell somewhere between modest to absent. According to Curt Smith’s book Storied Stadiums (Carroll and Graf, 2001), one Metrodome official went on record saying that the building was designed to, “get fans in, let ’em see a game and let ’em go home.”

Designed by the renowned Chicago architecture firm of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), the functionalist zeitgeist of the late ’70s nonetheless held sway.  The Metrodome was preceded by a handful of air-supported roofed stadiums, including the Pontiac Silverdome in 1975 outside Detroit, and the Carrier Dome at Syracuse University in 1980. Engineers at the time were fascinated by the new structural solution, and they marveled at the incremental improvements over previous designs at other locations. One innovation resulted in the Metrodome’s series of exterior steel-pipe braces that gird the exterior walls like an anemic crown roast (they apparently help keep the roof from collapsing inward).

Originally painted red (the default accent color of modernist architects from Bauhaus on down), the array of steel pipes has since been painted Vikings purple. Along with supersized poster graphics intended to reinforce the “Mall of America Field” brand, these are the only noticeable improvements to the building’s exterior in recent years—which makes sense. The Metrodome has never been a good urban neighbor to downtown Minneapolis the way most conventional structures are, or even can be. It is an inside-out building: What happens inside stays inside, unless the game is sold out and you can watch it on TV. Aside from game days, nobody comes and goes. The streets surrounding the building are barren. Its colossal size and featureless walls bear no relation to the articulated brownstone apartments of the nearby Elliot Park neighborhood or to the brawny, brick mill buildings lining the riverfront.  

Designed as a building that could go anywhere, the Metrodome really belongs nowhere. Designed to satisfy only functional needs, it spurns all human attachment and sentimentality. Whether the Vikings finally build their new stadium in Arden Hills, near Target Field or in California, one thing is certain: the Metrodome will come down. But this time, it will come down on purpose.

Phillip Koski is a Minneapolis-based architect and design writer, the founder and principal of Koski Architecture, and is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota College of Design.