Colorado-born architect Dan Meis has worked on some of the world’s best-known and most respected sports buildings. As a senior designer at Ellerbe Becket, he played a major role in projects like the Japan Saitama Super Arena, the world’s first truly transformable stadium. Later, he co-founded the Sports and Entertainment division of NBBJ and led the design of the Staples Centre in LA.
In 2007, he established his own multidisciplinary design firm, MEIS, with offices in New York and Los Angeles. Their projects include hotly-anticipated stadiums currently in the works for AS Roma and Everton FC.
Meis’s buildings are ripe with symbolism and conceived as placemaking ‘billboards’ for the cities they occupy. “My designs,” he says, “must create a sense of place and an experience that is both memorable and also financially and environmentally sustainable.”
Here he speaks to CLAD about his approach to design and the challenges facing sports architecture:
Why did you decide to become a sports architect?
I didn’t start my career as an architect choosing to design stadiums. I was interested in large-scale architecture. And when I did come across this world of sports design in the 1990s, most architects were based in Kansas City, Missouri, which wasn’t somewhere I necessarily wanted to live.
I was intrigued, though, that there was a handful of people in one place doing all these stadiums around the country. Eventually, I was grabbed by the potential of this career route to create large public buildings.
Why did you decide to start your own firm, having worked for the likes of NBBJ?
When I first started working in sports, it seemed the only way I could progress was as part of a really big firm. Clients were looking for architects to steward these very precious and expensive stadiums, so typically they’d look for a very large firm that had very deep resources.
What I always struggled with was that large firms, while they’re great at the functional delivery of buildings, are not always out of the box thinkers. It’s just not in their culture to be truly innovative because they’re so big. I was always fighting with that and trying to maintain some identity, but when you have 300 experts it’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘design by committee’.
Eventually, I decided that running a smaller independent practice would allow me to throw myself into a project. The team owners that hire me get a consistency of thinking that is the result of me doing this for 30 years. They also get my full attention and passion.
The limitation is we can’t do 10 projects at once, so we have to know what project is next, because things can come and go, or stop entirely. Otherwise, the move has definitely been an advantage.
It’s interesting that the likes of Herzog and de Meuron and BIG are now getting involved with stadium design, with their more singular approach. I think it’s a good thing because they’re raising the bar for everybody by showing that design, creativity and innovation are invaluable. It breaks up the cartel of the big firms, which is something I’ve always been in favour of.
What are the greatest challenges facing sports architecture?
The advent of TV revenue and increasing influence of corporate sponsorship has put pressure on a club to be successful. They have to be more and more financially healthy and that drives the feeling that they need to get bigger and better. The cost of stadiums in general is becoming really crazy, and it’s largely driven around the proliferation of amenities to generate revenue in the buildings. Owners have a tendency to feel they need to find new ways for people to spend their money.
Ten years ago I was designing NFL buildings for several hundred million dollars, and I thought that was a ton of money. Now they’re regularly over a billion.
I think the biggest challenge if you make this kind of investment, whether it’s private or public, is ensuring you build something truly flexible and long lasting, rather than a throwaway building which will need to be replaced before too long. It’s one of the tragedies of the US that so many of our stadiums get replaced after 20 years, with teams threatening to move cities if they don’t get permission for a new stadium.
How can the design industry respond to this challenge?
It’s on us to be more creative and to resist the ‘bigger is better’ ethos. Not every club is able to do a half a billion or billion pound building, so our challenge is to make sure fans still have a great home and their team remains competitive.
Buildings need to be right-sized for their markets and to create a great fan experience. If there are other elements and amenities that support the business of the owner, then great, but first and foremost it has to be great stadium for sport.
I think we also have to respect the heritage of old stadiums, even when designing new ones. My personal favourite stadiums are the likes of Wrigley Field in Chicago and Fenway Park in Boston [both built in the 1910s]. Not because of the retro architecture movement but because I love the idea that these buildings have memories. I worry that some clubs, in different sports, underestimate that. For example, we’ve seen with West Ham how a club can be taken out of a historic building and into a new home [the former London Olympic Stadium] that just isn’t right. A move like that changes a club forever.
But the secondary amenities are a very important part of the stadium you are designing for AS Roma?
Absolutely. What I’m trying to say is that the 24/7 mixed-use approach is not a panacea for every stadium. It really does depend on the location, and whether there is enough critical mass for it to really come alive when the sport is not on. Is it a place people want to come to? It’s like any real estate equation in that sense.
One of my early projects was the Staples Center, which is pretty well known for the entertainment district around it. We knew that was a good idea for LA, because that’s a building that has 300 events a year. In contrast, a football stadium maybe has 20 games and 30 events a year, so it’s more difficult to assume you can make it a 365 day destination.
In the case of Roma, though, we have planned all these amenities around it because there just aren’t many examples of outdoor entertainment destinations in the city. We’ve often said it’s hard to find a good sports bar to watch a game. So in this case the approach is viable and makes perfect sense. It can add value to the city.
You have embraced Twitter in a big way. What appeals to you about it?
One of the things that has evolved for me over the past couple of years is an understanding of the power of social media. It’s really given me the opportunity to engage directly with fans [whose stadiums we are designing]. I’m pretty careful, because all of a sudden you can have 20,000 opinions in a heartbeat, but, all kidding aside, it’s been really influential. Once you trawl through all the responses, you get a real sense of their passion and engage with their depth of feeling that this is their home. Those emotions become a really important driver of the design.
You have said that you like to create iconic ‘postcard or billboard projects’. Is this something your clients demand?
Yes, it’s a growing pressure. If you go back 50 to 100 years, sports buildings were mostly utilitarian. They grew up over time. You’d build one stand and add on more as demand grew, so they were really functional. Now there’s a growing expectation that you create something symbolic for your particular location.
Is there a dream project you’d love to work on?
It will be hard to ever surpass the emotional connection I have to Everton and the fans there, but I would love to work with Manchester United on Old Trafford some day. The history of that building, having survived the destruction of WWII, and the unique global brand recognition make it truly one of a kind. It’s recognised globally as the pinnacle of English football and the opportunity to help to capture that in the experience and future of such a historic venue would be very exciting.