Laurence Cheek, the architecture critic for the Indy Star has written a spot-on review of the new Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, the new home for the Indianapolis Colts, scheduled to host the Super Bowl in 2012. Before giving my opinion of the stadium itself, and a further dissecting of Cheek’s excellent review, here’s a taste of what makes his prose so tasty:

“Inside, you're immediately nailed by the sheer power of vast, enclosed space. It's 295 feet from playing field to roof peak, 846 feet from one end zone window to the other. We get an instinctive rush when we confront such a vast indoor space, because we're seeing that our not-so-humble species has the power to create worlds. Architecture moves us when it suggests that we've surpassed our old limitations, whether in imagination or technology.”

Nicely done. You don’t normally equate such elegant writing with football, though you do with the best of arhcitectural writing, and this review gives you a very good feel for the new building itself – its shortcomings and its successes – as well as the talent of the reviewer himself.

As for the building, which I have followed peripherally as a fan of monolithic arhcitecture and a great lover of the game of American football, it’s interesting in how it reflects the city in which it’s built, and how it differs from other stadiums recently built, and publicly financed. We’re in a era when new stadiums are going up at an alarming rate, and are ripped down just as quickly. Let’s face it: there’s a tremendous amount of money to be made and spent, and, as the review so aptly points out, it has a single chance to make a good impression on the people of Indianapolis.

So how does the stadium work in conjunction with the rich Modernist architecture history of Indiana and the Midwest? Fairly well, I think, in that it directly reflects the industrial past legacy of the state, and in that it does a good job of relaying an intimate experience in a space that will hold around 80,000 people for a game that is so fast, and so intricate, you have to be able to watch the minutae of it to get a good feel for it live.

The previous Indianapolis stadium, the RCA Dome, was – in Cheeks’ words – “typical American stadium-arena blobitecture – amorphous, anonymous, disposable.” The Lucas Oil Stadium, minus the massive logo of the naming sponsor, encloses the space with, dare I say it, delicacy that makes you believe you can reach out and touch the very infrastructure of the place. It hides nothing, nor does it want to. The same can be said about the review itself.

Even if you don’t like football, this is a really good piece of writing about an impressive subject. Give it 10 minutes of your time and thank me later. It’s exactly what good architecture writing should be. Check it out here.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 13, 2008