Green monsters

It’s appropriate that the New York Jets wear green — or at least it was. When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in 2002 a bold plan to transform Midtown Manhattan’s west side near the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center with a new stadium for the National Football League’s New York Jets (also part of the city’s Olympic bid), the proposed design represented what would have been easily the greenest facility of its kind in the world. Designed by New York’s Kohn Pederson Fox Architects (KPFA), with key assistance from London engineering firm Battle McCarthy, the stadium was to generate enough renewable energy to provide power not only for the 80,000 spectators gathering there, but even the surrounding neighborhood along the Hudson River.

Unfortunately for some green architecture enthusiasts, neighborhood opposition stalled the plan’s development. New York City lost the Olympics to London, and the Jets decided to remain beside the Meadowlands swamps in East Rutherford, N.J., where the team’s current shared venue, Giants Stadium, is located. In the five years since KPFA’s Manhattan stadium plan was first announced, there has not been another stadium to come along with a similar level of sustainability.

At the same time, each new stadium project brings a host of opportunities to save energy and, for all the millions of tons of concrete, steel and asphalt inevitably devoted to them, a chance to leave an ecologically sound impact upon the site and its surrounding environment. And while no other modern palace for pro football or baseball players will have a surplus of energy to give back to its neighborhood, many of today’s stadiums are utilizing next-generation materials and technologies to save money and reflect the values of the communities where they are located.

The first sports-team project to earn certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) was not a stadium, but a $34 million training facility and administrative headquarters for the Detroit Lions in Allen Park, Mich., designed by Gensler, a San Francisco-based architecture firm. The building includes bamboo flooring, nontoxic building materials and daylighting; the training field is surfaced with FieldTurf, a synthetic turf with backing made from recycled tires and athletic shoes; and the project team made efforts to preserve surrounding wetlands.

Medlar Field at Lubrano Park, a $30 million, 5,400-seat baseball stadium on the Penn State campus in State College, Penn., has the distinction of being the first ballpark ever to earn LEED certification. Highlights include water-efficient landscaping, a 76 percent construction waste recycling rate and power provided in part by a wind turbine system.

A new baseball park planned for the Washington, D.C., Nationals may raise the bar for built American stadiums. The $311 million Nationals Park, designed by HOK Sport of Kansas City, Mo., and set for completion in 2008, will feature a host of measures designed to foster efficient use of energy, water and materials. The stadium includes a 6,300-square-foot green roof over the concession stands, a field lighting system that achieves an energy savings of 21 percent compared to standard code requirements, and water systems that reduce water use by 37 percent through low-flow fixtures and other means. Unlike the failed New York Jets stadium, which faced community opposition in part because of projected traffic increases and corresponding air quality impacts disclosed in the project’s environmental review, the 41,000-seat Nationals Park plan includes just 1,225 parking spaces, and the team is working with city planners to encourage fans to use the Metro subway system.

But perhaps none of Nationals Park’s features is more unique than a massive water-filtering mechanism underneath the stadium. The system made of sand mimics wetlands by naturally filtering pollutants from the water. The filtration system also separates water used for cleaning the ballpark from rainwater that falls on the ballpark, treating both sources before releasing all the water to the sanitary and stormwater systems. The water efficiency efforts are tied to the larger goal of helping restore adjacent segments of the Anacostia River.

“For the average everyday fan, they’ll see the Anacostia River from the ballpark,” says Gina Leo of HOK Sport. “It’s very important that we protect it and not pollute it with peanut shells. We really believe we’re leaving the Anacostia River much better than we found it.”

The Minnesota Twins planned stadium, designed by HOK Sport, with green building in mind.

Along with St. Paul, Minn.-based architecture firm Ellerbe Becket, HOK Sport is one of the nation’s most prolific designers of major sports stadiums: The firm has designed stadiums for 30 National Football League (NFL) franchises, 24 Major League Baseball franchises, 120 colleges and universities, and dozens of other teams. It is a testament to how far into the mainstream green building industry has come when large corporate firms are increasingly applying sustainable design and construction techniques to such architectural behemoths. HOK even included sports arena design in its 2000 “HOK Guidebook To Sustainable Design” (a revised edition followed in 2005), which serves as a manual for building project teams, identifying onsite opportunities for alternative energy sources and developing water and energy usage targets.

 A participant in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Voluntary Cleanup Program for hazardous waste sites, Nationals Park also scores at least one LEED point for its reuse of a brownfield site: The stretch along the Anacostia River where the stadium is sited was previously home to a cement factory.

The reuse and transformation of the site, along with its easy access to mass transit, may be among its most sustainable features. The area surrounding the new stadium is also undergoing redevelopment, with mixed-use projects, office and retail. “We’ve been incorporating sustainable features into our projects for a long time,” Leo says. “But I think Nationals Park will tell the industry, yes you can do this. It’s been limited in the past. But this will prove it’s possible.”

The project is also designed to have a 50-year or longer lifespan, an important element of the project’s sustainability, according to Leo. “It’s not necessarily just about building an environmentally friendly project,” she says. “Our parents’ generation of stadiums didn’t have much of a shelf life. You think of those awful donut-shaped stadiums in places like Philadelphia and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Today, the stadiums we’re doing are long projects in both the design and construction phases, because we have to get it right. It’s our one chance in a generational span to create something that is long lasting.” HOK Sport is also pursuing LEED certification for two stadium projects in Minnesota for baseball’s Twins and the University of Minnesota.

However, sometimes it’s difficult to make a unique building type like a massive stadium fit LEED criteria created more with offices, schools and other traditional buildings in mind. HOK has advocated for the creation of a special LEED program for stadiums and arenas, something the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is considering, according to Brendan Owens, director of LEED technical development. USGBC has worked with a number of design teams to tailor LEED for stadium-specific design challenges, Owens says. “Sometimes it takes some interpretation to apply LEED for an end use that wasn’t necessarily in the front of our minds when it was written.”

In the past, Owens adds, USGBC has developed LEED rating systems for specific markets such as K-12 schools or the health care market as the need and requests developed. Currently, there are separate LEED systems for several specialized project types, including commercial interiors, existing building renovations, schools, homes neighborhoods and (anticipated in late 2007) retail spaces. Not all stadium projects are as invested in energy efficiency and green design, however. Two of the most recent projects on the West Coast include only minimal environmentally inspired investments. The University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., opened last year to almost universal acclaim for its bold exterior design by Peter Eisenman, as well as a unique retractable field surface. Stanford University rebuilt its historic Stanford Stadium in an astonishingly short time frame of only about nine months — but included only modest energy- and water-efficiency measures.

 One major player in the greening of sports stadiums has been the International Olympic Committee (IOC). IOC’s Agenda 21, adopted in 1999, set out a program to conserve and manage natural resources in the design of Olympic sports facilities and infrastructure as well as a host of other measures, which helped intensify energy-efficiency measures in the much-acclaimed Olympic stadium in Athens designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

“The IOC intends that development related to the Olympic Games be sustainable, with reference to future as well as present generations,” wrote Pál Schmitt, Chairman of the IOC Sport and Environment Commission, in a 2002 IOC report. “It is unrealistic, indeed naive, to think that the whole world will revert to a natural state, but it is not unrealistic to insist that further development be sustainable. Rather, it is imperative.”

The University of Oregon's Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., is hosting the 2008 Olympic trials, under a new, energy-efficient lighting system.

When a building team begins coordinating sustainable efforts, it typically looks for the biggest opportunities to create savings. There are opportunities to use recycled materials for the concrete and steel that go into the stadiums’ construction. But a bigger environmental factor for outdoor stadiums energy use, most of which comes from lighting. For example, TVA Architects of Portland is preparing the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., for the 2008 Olympic trials. Television broadcasts of the trials call for as many as 120 to 130 footcandles. (The foot-candle, the traditional industry standard for measuring stadium light levels, is based on the quaint measure of the light output from a birthday candle at one foot away) “That’s a tremendous amount of energy,” says Rob Curry, a sustainable design expert for TVA.

Rather than improving the efficiency of the lights themselves, lighting manufacturers such as Musco have improved precision of the light being directed, Curry says. “It’s directed on the field and not all over the place,” he explains. The renovation at Hayward Field also utilizes a staged system that can deliver anywhere from 20 to 120 foot-candles of light.

“The more they can be run at the lower levels, which is oftentimes just fine, it saves a lot of energy,” Curry adds.

Ultimately, though, the most sustainable aspect of a stadium may not have anything to do with the stadium itself, but instead where it’s placed. Access to transit, reuse of an old site, the impact on communities where projects are located: These are what determine a stadium’s sustainability as much as its design.

For example, one of the new Twins ballpark’s LEED points will come from its proximity to mass transit. In San Francisco, as the NFL’s 49ers have scrapped the idea of building a new stadium next to their longtime home, formerly known as Candlestick Park (but rechristened by a succession of sponsor names), because the site doesn’t have proper access to mass transit and major interstate freeways. Instead, the team now plans to build in nearby Santa Clara.

“The fact that 80,000 or 90,000 people can wind up going to a stadium once every week or so for three months, there’s a huge potential there for incorporation of mass transit,” USGBC’s Owens says.

Indeed, for all the advancements made in green building technology, Leo quips, “the most sustainable stadium in America might be Fenway Park in Boston. Because you’d be crazy to try and drive to a game there.”