Fan
intimacy and
a sweeping theatre-
sized screen are two of the
features of the design for the
Staples Centre Arena in Los
Angeles, as described by
Michael Hallmark of
NBBJ Sports and
Entertainment.

LUXURY STAKES

here has been a proliferation of sports venues developed in the U.S. and principal among this genre has been the indoor arena. Nearly all of the American cities with NBA or NHL franchises have replaced or renovated their facilities and the resulting economic drivers have helped shape the design imperatives of these projects for years to come.

Staples Centre Arena in Los Angeles will open in the fall of 1999 and represents the latest development in arena planning and design. Its sweeping bold exterior forms created to pay homage to the originality of LA architecture belie the complexity of the operations within. It will be the first arena in the world designed to accommodate three professional teams, the NBA Lakers and Clippers and the NHL Kings. To add to the diverse program, special floor area configurations will allow an unprecedented turnover rate to facilitate Los Angeles' appetite for blockbuster entertainment events such as the Grammy's and other globally broadcast productions.

The city of Los Angeles is a vast entertainment cornucopia of theme parks, movie studios, retail malls, beach life, and wide-ranging consumer spending options competing for dollars. Although LA County has a population of ten million, it is no surprise that sport still takes a back seat to much of the other leisure activities. Still, two of its local teams have gained a measure of international fame. The Los Angeles Dodgers and the LA Lakers have both won championships and are considered blue-chip franchises by most pro sports followers. But despite their worthiness for new facilities, both play in stadia more than three decades old, ancient venues when viewed against the blurring rush of America's sports and entertainment industry growth over the same period.
.

.
In the spring of 1996, the new owners of the Los Angeles Kings hockey team approached us to discuss the prospect of designing a new arena in Los Angeles. They were unabashed civic leaders and promoters of the local economy who believed the time was right for LA to become a fully participating member of Sports' Golden Age. Los Angeles, they believed, needed to develop a venue worthy of this City's position as a world Entertainment capitol. And since every aspect of sports and entertainment worldwide was flourishing, a privately financed arena, even one as complex as this would need to be, was seen as a risk worth taking. With marquee teams, a prominent site downtown next to LA's Convention Centre and Figueroa corridor, and a program designed to fully accommodate an aggressive sponsorship and advertising program, the 'high stakes' pieces of this project were all in place. The only thing needed now was a design that had the admittedly immodest goal of creating the most exciting arena facility ever built.

The design challenges for Staples Centre began with the site itself. Juxtaposed against an admired Convention Centre designed by Pei Cobb Freed architects, the project had the opportunity of accomplishing many important civic goals beyond the obvious commercial ones. Principal among those was a vitalisation of a downtown edge district that remained relatively inactive despite the new Convention Centre. There remained vast underdeveloped areas around the site with little hope that the convention centre alone would spur the synergistic development that often accompanies downtown arena development.

The first decision made was to use the building itself to define the important intersection at 11th Avenue and Figueroa. The offices that supported the tenants and operations of the arena were taken out of the traditional interior spaces they often occupy and made a part of the street scene. The low-rise scale of this component of the design also offered mitigation to the massive height and scale of the arena bowl. To further reduce the height, it was decided to recess the bowl approximately eight meters below the adjacent street level. This allowed fans to enter the arena at a prominent concourse level. The trucks and maintenance vehicles would be required then to ramp down to the lower level docks to load and unload. Fortunately, this had the additional benefit of relegating the arena's most unsightly operational function to an area completely free of public view. The other beneficiary of this decision was the security of the complex itself and with the high-profile events planned in the future, this issue was not an unimportant one.

Three major design elements will likely be seen as the most significant of Staples Centre's many original features: the large public entrance lobbies, the three levels of private suites and the sloping roof that sweeps from the convention centre tower toward the central downtown core.
.

.

Theatre in the Round
The lobbies owe their existence to our belief in the notion that arenas are, in fact, large theatres in the round. The traditional arena design, dating back to the Coliseum in Rome, were often completely symmetrical affairs with no perceived entrance. It was thought that because the bowl was usually uniformly symmetrical, the required entrances would also need to be so. Like a block of homogenised cheese, wherever one sliced through the building in section, it was the same.

In open parking lots, there was some merit to this approach. It was efficient for ingress and egress and allowed people to move from cars to the building interior rather quickly. The downside of this approach is that it gives into the banality of repetitious elements of the bowl design. It is also disorienting to fans, even those familiar with the facility.

Staples Centre, however, was not designed to sit in the midst of a sea of cars. It had a definite front door and a clearly defined relationship to two major streets in the busy city centre. That fact in conjunction with the physical requirements of an aggressive sponsorship program meant that the appropriate design response here demanded identifiable lobbies - spaces where people could mingle and meet - real places for gathering and not simply wide corridors in the otherwise required concourses. It would be here that the designers could create opportunities for sponsors as well. Opportunities that eventually would result in record breaking sponsorship alliances necessary for the funding of Staples Centre.
.

.
 
 

Luxury Suites
Luxury suites are not a new phenomenon to sports venues. They have been around for at least three decades in various forms. They first drew attention in the sports world however in the late 60's when the Dallas Cowboys sold them to private organisations for $100,000 each. These suites were built at the top of the Stadium and became forever known by the unfortunate label of Skybox because of their distance from the field. It was an unheard of amount of money for a piece of real estate no bigger than an average size bedroom. The legendary miscalculation in this enterprise became evident a few years later when one of those same suites sold for another unheard of price of $1 million. Now of course, facilities never sell this element of revenue in a project but rather license it to individuals in much the same way that we have access to a hotel room. We license its use for a specific period and have certain rights to its use during that period. However, the owner of the facility retains its own rights to control access, improvements, food and beverage, and eventually to escalate the price in due course. Today, $100,000 would buy very little in the Luxury Suite market and then most certainly for a single year only.

Despite its penchant for serving a wealthy and discriminating consumer base, eager to be the first and own the best, the City and surrounding county of Los Angeles had no suites in any of its sports venues before Staples Centre. This was truly an astonishing fact considering the buying power of this marketplace. Thus, an obvious component to any revenue plan in the new arena was the inclusion of private suites.

The lesson of suite design over the prior ten years taught us lessons in fan preferences regarding location of suites and clubs. Closer is better. 'Skyboxes' were difficult to sell and expensive to build and operate. The development of a mid-concourse suite/club location was ideal and proven effectively at many recently completed projects. The only question that remained for us to determine with the owner was how many.

As designers of many privately financed venues the economic realities of their fragile financing long ago removed any timidity we may have had regarding suite designs and placement. Suites were mandatory and needed to be located in the favoured spectator locations. In the new NBA / NHL arenas in Boston and Phoenix for example, we developed the radical (for its time) double stacked schemes that allowed all of the suites to be located at the more desirable mid-level. The metaphor we used with owners was the intimacy and drama of the balconies at La Scala. It was however, at that point, an unproven arrangement and developing the scheme kept us up at night with a gnawing angst that we were creating an undesirable upper deck isolation. Would fans accept this? Were we creating a seating "lower class" that could seriously effect ticket price value on the upper level? Amidst these worries, we also had concern for the intimacy of the spectator's experience: would the two-level suite section destroy the cohesiveness and energy contained within a continuous bowl?

America West Arena and Boston's Shamut Canter opened, and we were delighted to find that the balconies created by the suites' two rows of seating did exactly as we hoped. Fan Intimacy was enhanced by the verticality of the seating section. The varied seating created a new sense of excitement. We were both relieved and ready for the next evolution.

That came with the new demand for a record number of mid-concourse suites at Staples Centre. The owners required at least 150 suites in prime locations to satisfy their revenue proforma and the answer seemed obvious; if two levels of suites created such a popular reaction, why not three.

We studied a variety of bowl forms and finally settled on a variation that placed most of the suites at the side and on one end only. This left the "stage end" used for end stage concerts free for the development of a multi level club section.

After the operational demands were met, and the income producing components satisfied, we were still left with a concern for what the future might bring. Convinced that video technology would be king in the arena of the future, Staples Centre has been designed with a sweeping theatre-sized screen location at the highest end of the upper seating bowl. The design is reflected in the sloping roofline that will give the facility its most distinctive feature.

Predicting what's next in arena design has always been a difficult task. Each project built on the successes of the past and exploits the unique qualities of its own region for design inspiration.

Staples Centre is a project that has been blessed with propitious timing. A City ready for its development, sponsors eager to participate, and three teams sharing centre stage in one of the world's most notable entertainment Capitols. It promises to set high standards in all areas of arena development that are certain to endure.