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If the three competing designs for Phil Anschutz's Downtown football stadium were an NFL division, LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne says "they'd be the NFC West."
As is the case with that sorry division — which is now led by a pair of teams with losing records, the Seattle Seahawks and the St. Louis Rams — one of the stadium proposals eventually will win the design competition put together by entertainment giant AEG.But that doesn't mean it'll do much more than limp to victory — or to elevate the conversation about the kind of large-scale civic architecture we want or need in downtown L.A. and across the region.
Safe, sleek, inoffensive corporate architecture was the order of the day at AEG's Wednesday news conference, at which the company announced that after soliciting designs for a 72,000-seat, $1-billion stadium from eight firms around the country, it has shortlisted three: HKS, which designed the new Cowboys Stadium in Dallas; HNTB, architect of Invesco Field in Denver; and Gensler, which designed the new hotel and condo tower at AEG's L.A. Live.
Hawthorne likes the Downtown site better than Ed Roski's rival location out in Industry, but says Roski's stadium design is better.