Quakes fans now have something to dream about

At the Soccer Silicon Valley Foundation's second annual dinner, Lew Wolff and the Quakes revealed new conceptual images and a fly-in video of the future stadium. If you haven't been following this, here's a quick refresher:

• 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
  

The design is distinctly European in flavor, as it trades in a top-mounted deck of luxury suites for three rows of premium (club) seats along the pitch/field. By all accounts, the field itself will be slightly sunken from ground level. A single concourse under the main seating serves all. The U-shape is meant to contain noise and if anything direct noise out towards the airport, which is a good idea.

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.