- Location: Airport West property between SJC and SCU, near Lowe's
- Size: 15,000 plus berm and plaza space to approach 20,000 total
- Design: Horseshoe soccer-specific stadium, oriented northeast-to-southwest
- Architect: 360 Architecture
- Roof: Covers roughly half of seating area, with lights tucked underneath
- Video board: Two-sided, like Cisco Field concept
- Transit availability: Caltrain, future BART station
- Projected opening: ~2012
- Cost: $40-60 million
It's possible that the main seating bowl will be all steel, which takes a page from Stanford Stadium. That should make the stadium less expensive to build and noisier to boot. Next up is the fly-in video.
Don't get used to having "Earthquakes" on the roof. Once a naming rights sponsor is secured, you'll see the sponsor's name there.
The big takeaway from this is that the Quakes finally have something tangible in the stadium realm to sell to fans and potential sponsors. It's been a long time coming, and hopefully getting the necessary funding won't be such an uphill battle anymore.
I'll end this post with video of Wolff at the event last night. He pretty much covered everything in this post.
13 comments:
Looks outstanding. Should be a great true soccer stadium for the Earthquakes. Hopefully having something more tangible to sell sponsors on will be enough to push them over the top and get those last bits of financing in place for this privately funded stadium.
Hey ML- besides directing the noise as you pointed out, what other reasons would there be for the horseshoe shape. Seems like seating near the 18-yd box/behind the goal would still be pretty appealing to spectators. Aren't they passing on a lot of quality seats? Just curious.
Sure, they're passing up seats all right. It makes for a simple expansion path if the demand is there.
So will this also become THE venue for European and Mexican friendly's? Some rugby or Australian-rules football? I sure hope so!
If a friendly match can pull more than 20,000 there's no reason to have it at the Quakes stadium. Stanford is the de facto leader. If the 49ers stadium gets built, it will become the leader.
Rugby? Yes. Aussie Rules? Too small and not an oval.
The double-sided video board makes another appearance.
15,000-20,000 sounds too big. Do the Earthquakes ever draw that many people?
Anon 8:24, the Quakes historical average is over 13k. And that was with the previous owners who did no marketing to speak of and couldn't care less about the team, and 2 years under the current ownership in 10.3k Buck Shaw Stadium. With the current owners and a decent marketing plan filling 15k all the time should be fairly easy.
As far as CalTrain availability, it will be quite a nice walk from the Santa Clara station. It's probably about a mile and a half from the Santa CalTrain up the Alameda, crossing over to Coleman. Not the most pedestrian-friendly route either.
But I love this spot -it's 5 minutes from my house.
I wonder if Costco (also down the street) or Lowe's will complain about fans using their parking spaces, like in some other recent stadium battle...
There will eventually be a pedestrian bridge at the station to connect to the Coleman Ave side. Unfortunately it will only coincide with area BART construction.
re: There will eventually be a pedestrian bridge at the station to connect to the Coleman Ave side. Unfortunately it will only coincide with area BART construction.
...Something to look forward to in 20 years!
Hey Marine, any idea if the portraits of the players along the perimeter of the stadium are LCD screens? That's be great if they were, it'd be like wrapping it in Times Square or Shibuya.
Doubt it. The panels have some translucence to them, which leads me to believe the exterior will have perforate metal screens or panels. It might even be vinyl panels. Wraparound video displays would be prohibitively expensive.
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