Over at Sons of Sam Horn, there’s a discussion on the ongoing renovations to Fenway, which sidled nicely into the age-old debate on whether to move Fenway. I’ll skip aside the business perspective for this post (quick summary of my view: there’s already huge revenue from Fenway despite small crowds, and there are big ‘ifs’ regarding viability of paying back loans). From the standpoint of this architecture buff, there’s something that strikes me as inauthentic about many “quirks” in new ballparks exist only as an allusion to the fact that earlier ballparks have quirks. One of the things that’s nice about the Green Monster is that it exists as a way of fitting a ballpark into an urban space. (My favourite football/soccer team is Everton, which has a church that stands in one corner of the stadium, so I suppose I have a thing for urban integration.) A random quirk in a suburban park would just be a simulacrum of a feature.
This is not to say I want stand cookie-cutter ballparks. I just think that there’s something to be said for quirks actually arising from some relationship with the space (say, Camden Yards using the adjacent warehouse) rather than being plonked onto a structure. Of course, what a “relationship to space” means for suburban parks like the Ballpark at Arlington is debatable.
And it’s hard to guarantee a ballpark with atmosphere. It’s true, no one goes to the park just for the architecture (and many cities who’ve paid for spanking-new parks have found that without winning teams on the field, attendance starts to dwindle again). Still, many people think there’s something about Fenway, whereas a new park could very easily end up being ‘blah’. If a new park for the Sox merely follows the trends in ballpark design, it’s going to be just another postmodern retro ballpark, and will always end up unfavourably compared to Camden Yards, since that was the first of the postmodern parks. I trust the ownership won’t let that happen even if they do decide to move, but it’s just so hard to capture magic in architecture. Of course, New Fenway could be a park that ushers in a completely new trend in ballparks, which would be amazing.
Tangential link: A Daily Dose of Architecture had a post a while back on the idea that only losing teams ask for the construction of new ballparks… “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” I guess.