Christopher Hawthorne: From Minneapolis to Inglewood, the shifting politics of NFL stadium design
LOS ANGELES - The architectural nostalgia that poured into nearly every corner of Major League Baseball a generation ago, uncorked by the opening in 1992 of Baltimore's willfully eccentric and doggedly old-fashioned Camden Yards, did very little to change the look of football stadiums. When Super Bowl LII kicks off Sunday inside 2-year-old U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, home of the National Football League's Vikings, we'll get an up-close look at how loyal football has remained to a self-consciously futuristic, if often sleekly anodyne, approach to design.
Much like Atlanta's new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, AT&T Stadium in Dallas (2009) and the University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona (2006), the Minnesota stadium is a monument to the idea that football, in great contrast to baseball, must always be moving forward. Designed by HKS Architects and built at a cost of $1.1 billion, among its most dramatic design elements - just to drive the point home - is a sharply angled exterior wall that the architects call "the prow."
Sometimes this forward motion can feel like a forced march to the
