by Russell Boniface
Associate Editor

Summary: The new Arvest Ballpark minor league baseball stadium in Springdale, Ark., features a rooftop cantilevered tensile fabric structure wrapping around the ballpark to provide shade for the sky boxes and one-deck seating bowl. Tensile structures also serve as canopies at the stadium entrance and exit points. Kansas City, Mo.-based HOK Sport designed Arvest Ballpark and partnered with Costa Mesa, Calif.-based FabriTec Structures on the tensile fabric canopy. Arvest Ballpark has been named Ballpark of the Year by Baseballparks.com.

How do you … use tensile fabric structures to maximum advantage in a stadium?

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LINKS

AIA Arkansas’ quarterly newsletter COLUMNS details the component’s ongoing activities, with an archive dating back to 2005.

Visit Baseballparks.com to read about Arvest Ballpark and its selection as Ballpark of the Year.

PICTURES

View the photo gallery of the Arvest Ballpark. Photos © 2008 FabriTec Structures.

SOLOSO

The AIA’s resource knowledge base can connect you to the multimedia presentation Tensile Architecture and High-Performance Building Design.

See what else SOLOSO has to offer for your practice.

AIA BOOKSTORE

Building Type Basics for Recreational Facilities, by RIchard J. Dietrich, 2005.

This Week Connects is a collection of resources directly related to the article you are reading. We hope you find this a valuable, useful new tool from AIArchitect.

Arvest Ballpark, home of the Northwest Arkansas Naturals, is one of the first ballparks to incorporate tensile fabric into its design. The cantilevered rooftop tensile fabric canopy sits above the stadium’s glass sky-box suite level. Light steel supports the tensile fabric. The fabric perimeter has support cables within, with exterior cables on its edges.

Tensile canopy a metaphor for Arkansas geography
Norman Friedman, AIA, HOK Sport project designer, says the new Arvest Ballpark serves as a metaphor for the northwest Arkansas environment. “The naturalistic beauty of the environment makes northwest Arkansas standout,” he says. “When we looked at what’s special about the region, we thought it was appropriate to design a grounded ballpark with a stone base that speaks to the region’s geography, with forward-looking glass and steel growing from it, capped by a contemporary fabric canopy looking to the future of northwest Arkansas. The canopy is a metaphor for the clouds that hover above the landscape.”

Gary Haymann, executive vice president of sales for FabriTec Structures, worked with HOK Sport, the architect and designer of the project. “Minor league stadiums are generally grassroots, with baseball being very traditional,” he says. “Putting an architectural, innovative fabric on a stadium is a step out of the box for a traditional minor league stadium. The Northwest Arkansas Naturals have been very receptive, and it has worked out extremely well.”

Ballpark steels design bases
HOK Sport designed the ballpark and FabriTec Structures worked on the details of the structural steel and fabric for the roof. “One challenge was the fabric roof required a lot of steel to hold it up, but we wanted it to look light, like it was floating,” describes Friedman. “We uplighted it from the top of the suites so it looks like it is floating, with the steel holding it up in a manner that makes it look as light as possible. There is a lot of structural steel in the fabric roof, but the light tensile fabric brings the building and roof together as a single structure.”

Explains Haymann: “HOK worked with us to develop further the concept as to how it would look with fabric in a practical reality, such as designing the steel and the connections. We worked hand-in-hand with them on how to resolve the loads in the roof and how to minimize the steel weight to achieve the architectural and design intent.”

Adds Friedman: “We didn’t want it to look like one [firm] did the ballpark structure and one did the roof. What every architect wants is for all the components to come together. We wanted the architecture of both the building and the roof to look like it came from one hand.”

Haymann notes that steel lends itself to tensile fabric’s appeal. “Its glory is lighter steel and more fabric and cables to reduce the load.” The tensile fabric shades some of the seats below and also provides shade through the glass of the skyboxes. Tensile fabric canopies also mark entrances and exits. “Those provide shade and create a focal point, and if it’s raining, people waiting for tickets are protected. The tensile fabric also creates an architectural element that complements the facilty’s design.”

Working with the architects
Haymann hopes that more minor league ballparks adapt tensile fabric structures. He recommends to architects who are designing a tensile sports complex that they bring in a tensile fabric company early in the process to help develop how the concept would work. “When we come in early into the process, there’s a synergy from one step to the next,” he says. “For example, there are preliminary loads and reactions, and you understand what that is going to do, so you can compensate for it correctly and come up with something spectacular. When it’s moved into final design, there aren’t any surprises. The tensile fabric coordinates with the other aspects of the project, and then the project moves into construction.”

Haymann says that the unique look, appeal, and application of tensile fabric structures lend themselves to different possibilities, and tensile fabric structures are rarely the same. “Fabric is one of the most innovating things out there, and fabric architecture itself is becoming a widely accepted principle. Architects can do anything. For example, there are newer fabrics out there that allow for more and less light into the space. There are different things you can achieve depending on the climates, the look, and the goals.”