There are other people who know how a soccer game is supposed to be played, for example. So my thing, for instance, is I want to make sure it looks like a million bucks, like it’s something no one else has ever seen. Everybody brings a different knowledge base. HD: For the whole process, how collaborative is it at Populous? As that continued, the sort of gem idea came naturally. We said, 'Hey, let’s play that up.’ So we got this idea of a geometric object made of something simple in an industrial fashion. They fill it in and make it all brand-new. I think that a lot of cities have that, but they don’t celebrate it. What really hit us was the industrial nature that happened. Then you start reading about the area, because you don’t want to just stick something in there, willy-nilly. I did that a few times, enough to start getting a feel for it.
I would go running there in the morning when I would come to visit, and then I would come back mid-day, and then I would walk through in the evening. If you always go at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, you’re always going to see the same side of a neighborhood. LS: It’s not how many trips, it’s how different are the times you spend there. HD: So how many trips does that take, to get an idea of the neighborhood and the site? After establishing the idea, it was, ‘Now that we know we want to do this sort of icon for the neighborhood, what’s appropriate? After spending time in the neighborhood walking around, what makes sense there?’ That was the most amazing thing about this project was that the Dynamo from the get-go have said, ‘Let’s do something that’s totally amazing and something new and something different, while at the same time respecting soccer heritage.’ That comes out especially in this wraparound bowl, so that there isn’t a bunch of breakage that’s quintessential as part of the soccer experience. Then it becomes, ‘Now we’ve got this plot of land and this many people we want to fit on it, so how progressive do you want to be? Do you want to be something that says I’m a soccer stadium or do you want to do something that says I’m the soccer stadium? I want to do something totally new.’ We hear, ‘We would like to do a new stadium and where could we do it? Here are some sites we’re looking at,’ or, ‘Here’s a site we’re looking at.’ In the case of the Dynamo, there was a long gestational period of, ‘How big is it? How many people do you want to go to these games? How intimate do you want it?’ I think once you settle on that, the rest sort of happens in a linear fashion. HD: How does the design process work, from getting the call from the Dynamo and AEG to where we are now? Populous architect Loren Supp sat down with to discuss some of his favorite aspects of the forthcoming Dynamo stadium, the process of designing the stadium, and more.