Zimagal Monthly Magazine - Volume One, Issue Five

Pictured: Exterior of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore.

Baseball was originally played on sand lots, the first fans sitting on wooden bleachers around the playing field. Since then, there has been an evolution of the ballpark. The baseball arena has gone from the utilitarian to the chic, from red hots and beer to crab cakes and cappuccino. But as stadium design evolved, everything old became new again. Use of natural grass led to experiments with artificial turf, and back to natural grass again (albeit specially grown varieties with sophisticated built-in field watering systems.) So too has the architecture changed: from old time neighborhood parks with an attention to detail, to featureless modern space-age bowls, back to the old style park with special architectural touches.

In this article, I speak of the stadium as a building, not discussing the aspects of the playing field, but simply the architectural wholeness of it. To my eyes, there are four basic schools of stadium design. For this exercise, I will refer to them as the Old, the Ugly, the Flying Saucer, and the Redux.

The Old. This style of stadium is otherwise known as the "Lost Ballpark"; the only example left is venerable Fenway Park. In many cases, these stadiums (stadii?) had architecture which echoed the era in which they were built, especially if located in the middle of a big city.

The Ugly. Many of these structures were built between the 50s and the 70s and follow no real design convention. The thing that unites them into a category is their sheer ugliness.

The Flying Saucer. These Space Age babies resemble apartment buildings straight out of The Jetsons.

The Redux. These stadiums are all new structures, many designed by the firm of Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum. Although decidedly modern, they have an element of the old style of ballpark within their architecture.