College Football is Eating Its Own Architecture With Terrible Stadium Renovations
Ohio Stadium was modeled on the Pantheon. Not loosely inspired by it, but literally modeled on it. When architect Howard Dwight Smith designed the Horseshoe in 1921, he was making a deliberate argument that football, the American civic religion, deserved a building with the gravitas of antiquity. The great Roman temple has stood essentially unaltered for two millennia. Ohio Stadium has been renovated multiple times over a hundred years.
The 2001 renovation, a $194 million project that lowered the field, added decks, and brought the capacity north of 100,000, was done with reasonable care for the original composition. The bones of Smith's building survived. Then in 2017, Ohio State began another round of suite renovations, adding premium loge seats and premium suites that departed from the architectural logic of the existing suite levels. It is among the least offensive of the offenders. The fact that we grade on a curve this steep tells you something about the state of the enterprise.
Everywhere else the news is worse.
College football built some of the finest sports architecture in American history. These were not incidentally beautiful buildings. They were intentionally monumental ones, designed to house a civic experience on a civic scale. Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska, opened in 1923 as a literal war memorial, fundraised by the alumni association as an act of collective tribute. The LA Memorial Coliseum, opened the same year, hosted two Olympics, two Super Bowls, a World Series and a papal mass. Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin was an exercise in classical symmetry: a great open horseshoe, growing organically over decades, maintaining a coherent profile against the Texas sky. These were buildings that understood their own importance.
The renovation era has treated them as platforms for endless addition according to the whims of contemporary athletic department fundraising regimes, with little regard for their history or architectural composition.
The sin is rarely demolition. It is subtler and in some ways worse: the incremental accumulation of additions by people who neither understand nor care about what they are adding onto. Each project is justified in isolation, with a new suite level here, a premium club there, a new scoreboard structure, or an end zone enclosure, and each is procured through the athletic department's revenue logic rather than an architect's compositional one. The result, compounded over thirty years of arms-race spending, is a building that no longer has much coherence and in some cases is downright ugly to look at.
The LA Memorial Coliseum is one of the more egregious single cases. This is a National Historic Landmark. It is one of four stadiums so designated in the United States. It opened in 1923 as a monument to the dead of the First World War, a classical peristyle structure of such civic weight that Los Angeles has returned to it repeatedly during the Olympics in 1932 and 1984. It has hosted Super Bowls and is a site of national mourning and national celebration alike.
USC, which took over management of the Coliseum under a 98-year lease in 2013, completed a $315 million renovation in 2019. The centerpiece was the Scholarship Club Tower, a massive new structure inserted into the south side of the stadium to house suites, loge boxes, club seats, a new concourse and a press box. It runs nearly goal line to goal line along the south stands. It is enormous, like an alien spaceship seemingly intentionally seeking to disrupt the symmetry of the otherwise striking stadium bowl, and belongs to an entirely different aesthetic universe than the stadium it was attached to. The classical peristyle end of the Coliseum, including the iconic arched colonnade that has appeared in ten thousand photographs, was somewhat restored in the renovation. The south side was simultaneously made unrecognizable. USC's architects said the tower was designed to be inserted "seamlessly into the existing stadium bowl." It was not inserted seamlessly. Nothing about it is seamless. It is a large revenue structure grafted onto a war memorial, and from certain angles you can see exactly where the old building ends and the money starts.
The $315 million price tag is worth pausing on. This was a massive investment in premium amenities, and the building that resulted is visually incoherent in proportion to the investment.
Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin was similarly, for most of its life, a coherent object. The open horseshoe had a natural logic: it grew at the ends, it grew up the sides, it maintained a relationship between its parts. The stadium that exists now is the product of so many sequential interventions, including suites added to the west side in 1997, an upper deck on the east side in 1998, a north end zone complex in 2008, a south end zone enclosure completed in 2021, that the original organizing idea has been buried under the accumulation. Each project added something. Nothing seemed to pay any attention to whether the whole thing still worked. The south end zone closure in particular, which finally enclosed the stadium for the first time in its history, was executed with the kind of architectural bluntness that comes from treating a building as a capacity problem rather than a composition. Its designers molded the access tunnels into a rough-looking Longhorn shape from which the team spills onto the field during its pregame ceremony. It's a kind kitschy literalism that may have intrigued some recruit on Tik Tok somewhere, but it degrades the quality of the historic stadium.
The enclosed stadium holds 100,000 people. It looks like it was finished by a different architect than it was started by because, effectively, it was.
Luckily for Texas, rival Texas A&M's mishmash of different and discordant styles is equally eye-searing, if not worse.
Nebraska's Memorial Stadium has spent the last thirty years in a similar condition: a layered accretion of additions to east, west, north, and south that has left the building looking like the result of a series of negotiations rather than a design, with massive sprawling single-decked end zones, and then incoherently steep multi-decked sideline seating towers. The various additions don't speak to each other. They don't need to, since each was funded separately, procured separately, dedicated separately and celebrated separately as a new chapter in Husker football. The stadium now faces a $600 million rebuild that will tear down the South Stadium and replace it with a new structure. Whether this produces something coherent or merely the next layer of the accretion remains to be seen.
At Penn State, separate end zone additions made no effort to speak any kind of coherent architectural language to one another. The first embodied a continuous curve when constructing a large second deck in one of the end zones. The second discordantly flattened the styling in the other end zone and instead turned that end zone into a triple-decked monster with a flat edge where the other is rounded, while also dwarfing the single-decked sideline seating areas usually seen as most desirable. The stadium is consequently caught between looking faintly like a horseshoe, faintly like a bowl, but mostly just like a shape that experienced a bout of misshapenness somewhere along the way.
Kinnick Stadium in Iowa City similarly expanded both end zones, only to do it in discordantly incoherent styles that throw off the balance of the entire historic stadium. One is curved and sprawling. The other triple-decks an otherwise universally single-decked stadium with a compressed vertical density that it seems wildly out of place with the rest of the venue.
Maryland's football stadium is another egregious example, where a previously symmetrical modest horseshoe is now triple- to quadruple-decked on one side of the playing field, while the other side is single-decked but with a four-story end zone to end zone press box.
The SEC stadiums are collectively the worst offenders, a who's who catalog of discordant pilings of piecemeal renovations that read like nails on a chalkboard in terms of architectural composition. Ole Miss, Arkansas, and others have grown through this iterative logic: a press box here, a suite level there, an upper deck that doesn't quite match the lower one, into buildings that retain the footprint of their original grandeur while losing its grammar. The old venues had a vernacular. They knew what they were. The renovated versions either ignore, or are embarrassed by the inability of their own history in the particular way that institutions become embarrassed by anything that doesn't look new, namely that they can't make enough suite money on them. And so they cover it over with something more contemporary and premium-worthy, and the contemporary thing has no relationship to what it's covering.
One egregious example is LSU, a historic stadium but one whose original bowl has had partial upper decks slapped atop it in several disconnected discordant styles and geometries, each wrapping a different length and partial curvature. This now includes a fourth deck in its closed end zone at the very top that has in places just three rows in it, a visually unbalanced coda in no way symbiotic with the proportions of the rest of the stadium.
At Sanford Stadium in Georgia, a double-decked symmetrical horseshoe is now off-kilter thanks to a visually lazy third deck slapped partially onto the top of just one side of the venue.
Mississippi State is also a serious offender with numerous partial-upper decks that feel like half-efforts, with little effort to unify any kind of overall aesthetic between them.
This is the paradox of the renovation arms race. It is nominally preservationist: these schools are not tearing down their historic stadiums and building new ones. But it is practically destructive, because the buildings that result from thirty years of piecemeal addition are no longer the buildings that were preserved. They are composites, in some cases feeling almost intentionally altered for maximum visual incoherence. Each is little more than a memory bank of a series of transactions, each designed to maximize a momentary increase in ticket sales revenue.
The timing matters. This is all happening as college football undergoes the most comprehensive structural upheaval in its history, including conference realignment that has erased regional rivalries built over a century, NIL that has transformed the amateur into something more honestly professional and a transfer portal that has made roster continuity a memory. The sport is in the process of liquidating the things that made it distinct from professional football: the sense of place, the tradition, the intergenerational connection to a specific program in a specific landscape.
The stadiums are part of that same liquidation, though the least talked about casualty of it. When Ohio State - as it is currently doing - piles a new suite level onto a building modeled on the Pantheon without worrying too much about whether the lines match, it is making the same statement the Big Ten made when it added USC and UCLA: that the category of "what this used to mean" has been subordinated to the category of "what this can generate." The stadium looks like the accounting.
The care taken to model so many early stadiums on the grand venues of ancient Greece and Rome confirms that original buildings understood that a great stadium is not just a platform for revenue. It is a place. The distinction sounds romantic but has practical consequences. A platform can be endlessly modified in service of the next revenue concept. A place cannot be modified without being changed, and once changed in ways that ignore its original logic, it cannot be unchanged. Ohio Stadium's architect looked at the Pantheon and thought: we should build something that lasts. His successors are now looking at Ohio Stadium and seemingly thinking primarily about club seating. Both groups built something that reflects their values. Hopefully enough of the original values can survive the current upheaval.
