Danish architecture studio BIG has broken ground on its layered Las Vegas stadium for the Major League Baseball team the Athletics, which will be the studio’s first baseball stadium.
The June ground-breaking follows designs of the stadium released in March 2024 for the Athletics’ (The As) home base in Las Vegas after the team transferred from its origin city in Oakland, California, where BIG also proposed a stadium for the team in 2018.
Updated renders of the Athletics Las Vegas Ballpark stadium show a more detailed, metal shell and interior spaces, such as lounges and concession booths.
“This groundbreaking is a great milestone for our almost decade-long collaboration with the A’s,” said BIG founder Bjarke Ingels. “It marks the end of a long journey to find the new home for the A’s, and on a personal note, the groundbreaking of our first baseball stadium.”
“The A’s Armadillo is unlike any other ballpark, and will not only be a great home for the team and the sport, but also a striking new architectural character in the string of pearls along the Las Vegas Strip.”
Located on a nine-acre site between Tropicana and Reno Avenues, the stadium is made up of five overlapping, arched volumes.
The individual volumes are wedge-shaped, which pays homage to baseball pennants, or flags, while the stadium’s overall mass was designed to resemble the armadillo, an animal native to the American Southwest.
The exterior of the stadium will be clad in square metal panels and will be fronted with “an expansive cable-net glass wall” at its entrance. Upon the release of the designs, BIG claimed the wall is set to be the “largest cable-net glass wall in the world” if completed.
Interior renders of the stadium show an extensive structure underneath the domed volumes and above the central atrium. Expansive, curved skylights slice through the ceiling between the joints of the five volumes.
The stadium seating was split into an upper and lower bowl, informed by historic baseball parks such as Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field, according to BIG.
The design will also allow for “the closest seats to home plate” in Major League Baseball (MLB).
“Fostering a more intimate connection to the field than traditional ballparks, the Athletics Las Vegas ballpark features the closest seats to home plate and the smallest foul territory of any MLB stadium,” said the studio.
Renders also show a domed lounge area and stadium seating bordered by snack bars.
The stadium was designed in collaboration with engineering firm HNTB, while other engineering firms such as Thornton Tomasetti and Henderson Engineers are also invovled.
According to BIG, future development, such as a casino and hotel, is also slated for the surrounding site.
Dezeen recently rounded up seven major stadiums that are in progress in the US and ten ambitious future football stadiums set to be built around the world.
The images are by Negativ
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