ASU Mountain America Stadium Transformation

The Arizona State University Mountain America Stadium is an unusual and iconic object in the middle of the city, somewhere between mountain, stadium, and infrastructure. Unlike anything else around, this is an ‘architecture’ at the scale of geology.

Never fully formed since its original construction in 1958 within the saddle of Tempe Butte, change has been the ever-present constant, with subsequent modifications continuing to fortify the stadium from its urban and natural context.

Originally conceived as a large, closed-off, single-use football venue on the outskirts of campus, the stadium and butte now find themselves in the center of an encroaching urban and university campus context.

This new condition and the University’s desire for a multi-use educational environment required the site to become a porous 365-day use open-ended event and educational infrastructure.  Formal strategies to open up the site for greater porosity and connection to context are paired with programmatic ones where the site can now support a myriad of cross-disciplinary educational, social, and community functions.

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The scale of this undertaking and the sheer physical size of the found condition required a level of improvisation paired with diligent orchestration of immense human, technological, and logistical resources.  With a mandate to not miss any home games over several years of construction, the project required multiple phases of design and construction happening simultaneously in different parts of the site.  As the scope changed during the project, creativity, accuracy, flexibility, and responsiveness were critical to solving problems on the fly and keeping the construction moving forward.