Wednesday, April 14, 2004
New-Look Cellular Stands Out
Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reviews the newly-truncated U.S. Cellular Field. The park opened in 1991 -- significantly, one year before Camden Yards rewrote the book on baseball stadium design -- and has already received $69 million in renovations to make it "more like the ballpark it always should have been." As Kamin says:
"Never before has a stadium so young been so drastically redone. It's an unspoken admission from the White Sox and the Sports Facilities Authority that the original design was a flop."
The latest renovations, Phase 4 of a 5-part project, eliminated the top eight rows of the upper deck (and 6,600 seats) and lowered the stadium's roof. The park doesn't dominate its surroundings to the degree it did before.
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Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin reviews the newly-truncated U.S. Cellular Field. The park opened in 1991 -- significantly, one year before Camden Yards rewrote the book on baseball stadium design -- and has already received $69 million in renovations to make it "more like the ballpark it always should have been." As Kamin says:
"Never before has a stadium so young been so drastically redone. It's an unspoken admission from the White Sox and the Sports Facilities Authority that the original design was a flop."
The latest renovations, Phase 4 of a 5-part project, eliminated the top eight rows of the upper deck (and 6,600 seats) and lowered the stadium's roof. The park doesn't dominate its surroundings to the degree it did before.
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