Gehry Glitter

One morning in May, at the monthly board meeting of the Economic Development Corporation, Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Kay Barnes hit the highlights of her plan to build a downtown arena. The mayor wanted new taxes on hotel stays and car rentals to cover about half of the cost, which would be $225 million to $250 million.

Funded by the city, the Economic Development Corporation is more or less an auxiliary mayor’s office. Predictably, Barnes’ brief presentation was met with applause.

The cheering had barely subsided, though, when board member Beth Derrough piped up with a comment. The city, Derrough said, should hire homegrown architects.

A few weeks earlier, four Kansas City-based sports-architecture firms had announced their intention to collaborate on the design of the arena. The consortium — HOK, Ellerbe Becket, CDFM2 and Heinlein Schrock Stearns — boasts a wealth of experience. Members of the Downtown Arena Design Team, as they want to be known, have built 25 of the 28 latest arenas to house National Basketball Association and National Hockey League teams.

By pledging to work together, team members hope to make it impossible for the city to reject four local employers in favor of another architect.

Even one with Frank Gehry’s reputation.

Gehry is famed for designing the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. He’s a brand name, like Frank Lloyd Wright.

And he wants to do Kansas City’s arena.

Gehry is trying to land the job with the help of Crawford Architects, a firm with offices in Sydney, Australia, and midtown Kansas City. David Murphy and Tom Proebstle, principals at the firm, have impressive résumés of their own. They played leading roles in the renovation of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the design of the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

“We have sports expertise,” Proebstle says. “Frank is a visionary.” But Gehry’s worldwide recognition may not be enough to sway the city to try something out of the ordinary.

If arena proponents can overcome opposition from rental-car companies, City Councilwoman Saundra McFadden-Weaver and others who are urging voters to turn down the financing scheme on August 3, will Kansas City end up with a less-than-stellar facility out of a sense of obligation to, as Derrough urged, hire the local team?

Proebstle says the Downtown Area Design Team has been “laying on the grease” to make its selection seem inevitable. The team has hired a public-relations firm and offered to draft a rough arena design so voters can carry a mental image to the polls. “They’re trying to get out ahead in terms of these so-called good ideas,” he says. “There’s nothing new in what they’re saying. They’ve done it in every other city.”

The Crawford guys fashion themselves the Apple to the Downtown Area Design Team’s Microsoft. They suggest that HOK and Ellerbe Becket, the largest sports-architecture firms in the world, have become plodding bureaucracies, churning out unoriginal designs.

“You have all this talent, but it’s gotten stagnant,” Murphy says. He and Proebstle worked at Ellerbe Becket before leaving for Crawford in 2001.

Murphy is not the first to suggest that the leading sports-architecture firms may have hit a creative wall. Elements of the retro baseball stadium — brick facings, painted steel, asymmetrical outfields — are fast becoming clichés. “Who knows? Maybe these will be the cookie-cutter stadiums of their day,” Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt said to the Associated Press after the HOK-designed Citizens Bank Park opened this spring in Philadelphia.

Neil deMause, a co-author of the book Field of Schemes, which casts a critical eye at public subsidies for sports stadiums, says the new ballparks are becoming harder to distinguish. “The only way to tell what city you’re in these days is to check which ex-ballplayer is running the barbecue stand,” he tells the Pitch.

And even though HOK is still capable of terrific designs — PNC Park in Pittsburgh and SBC Park in San Francisco are considered gems — its buildings do not make dramatic statements the way Frank Gehry’s do. The curving glass, titanium and limestone of the Guggenheim in Bilbao turned a derelict port city into a tourist destination.

“Kansas City deserves a Frank Gehry,” Proebstle says.

To blunt Gehry’s appeal, the design team is selling trust. “We have never missed a deadline,” says Stuart Smith, an Ellerbe Becket spokesman, speaking for the team. “We’ve brought all of them in on time and on budget.”

The design team is also dropping hints that star architects court danger. “A building that looks beautiful in postcards but goes bankrupt in practice ruins our collective reputation,” Brad Schrock, a principal at Heinlein Schrock Stearns, warned in a press release.

The competition for the design of the downtown arena is unlike any other. A major sports facility has not been built in Kansas City in more than 30 years. The Sprint Center, as the new arena would be called, presents a unique opportunity for hundreds of sports architects employed at various firms.

“So many of the designers in this town do their work by getting on airplanes and flying to faraway locations, either other spots in this country or overseas,” Smith says. “How exciting would it be to be able to work on a project in your own backyard, to be able to take your spouse or your neighbor or your child down and actually touch a building that you worked on?”

Kansas City is to sports architecture what Silicon Valley is to microchips largely because of the Truman Sports Complex. The sports practices at HOK and Ellerbe Becket were founded by architects who worked at the engineering giant HNTB, which designed Kauffman and Arrowhead stadiums.

Business boomed in the 1990s as local governments rushed to put their professional sports teams in swanky digs. HOK became renowned for its designs of baseball stadiums: Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Jacobs Field in Cleveland, Coors Field in Denver. Ellerbe Becket has dominated arena design, winning commissions in Phoenix, St. Louis, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

Heinlein Schrock Stearns and CDFM2 are smaller firms started by architects who left HOK and Ellerbe. Heinlein Schrock Stearns designed an arena and planned the surrounding district in Columbus, Ohio. CDFM2 has designed athletic facilities at several universities and is working on the new H&R Block headquarters.

The firms compete for pieces of a shrinking pie. Two-thirds of professional sports teams play in facilities built or remodeled within the past 12 years. “There’s no question that there are fewer projects now,” says Ron Turner, a sports architect who worked at Ellerbe and at Seattle-based NBBJ.

The business can be crazy. Turner and two other architects left Ellerbe in 1995 after their bid to buy the sports practice was rejected. Turner thought the offer was welcome; instead, the trio was barred from entering the building. “After hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to the firm, they wouldn’t let us go back to the office,” Turner says. “It was so awful.”

Turner and his partners, Michael Hallmark and Dan Meis, took revenge by founding the sports practice at NBBJ and winning commissions for the design of the Staples Center in Los Angeles and Safeco Field in Seattle. Turner and Meis now work for themselves.

Sports architecture is a small world. Brad Schrock consulted on Safeco Field. Murphy and Proebstle worked on the football stadium next door to Safeco while they were at Ellerbe. Like Turner, Proebstle and Murphy did not leave Ellerbe with warm regard for the top partners. “They eat their own there,” Murphy says.

Ego and money cause friction. They can also drive outstanding work. John Gaunt, dean of the school of architecture at the University of Kansas and a past president of Ellerbe Becket, says competition forced a high level of competence. “These guys really worked at how people should view sporting events,” Gaunt says, citing unobstructed sight lines as an example of an advance in sports architecture.

Gaunt says he was “quite surprised” to learn that longtime rivals (Proebstle calls them “bitter enemies”) HOK and Ellerbe decided to collaborate on the Kansas City arena. Mayor Barnes receives most of the credit for bringing the firms together. Ellerbe spokesman Smith says Barnes told an Ellerbe principal a year ago, “You know, wouldn’t it be great if some of your firms could team?”

Smith says Ellerbe reached out to Heinlein Schrock Stearns, and HOK extended a hand to CDFM2. Then the big boys started talking.

By encouraging cooperation, Barnes spared the city from having to choose, say, Ellerbe over HOK. At the same time, the formation of the design team makes it difficult for the city to select an outsider like Gehry.

Murphy says that Barnes’ desire for a fair competition is genuine. “She has gone out of her way to create a level playing field,” he says. Barnes has met with Gehry, who has inspected the future site of the Sprint Center.

What burns the Crawford guys are comments like Beth Derrough’s. Murphy and Proebstle like to note that HOK’s and Ellerbe’s main offices are in other cities (HOK’s in St. Louis, Ellerbe’s in Minneapolis) and that the only work in town they do is on their own buildings. Crawford, meanwhile, is tackling complicated local projects, such as converting the downtown Law Building into residential and retail units.

“They’ve taken a lot from this city,” Murphy says of HOK and Ellerbe. “It drives me nuts when they suggest they’re owed anything.”

Murphy and Proebstle also reject the suggestion that Gehry is an untrustworthy, black-cape type. Bill Zahner, the chief executive of the Kansas City-based A. Zahner Company, which fabricated the metal skins for several of Gehry’s buildings, says clients’ unrealistic demands are usually to blame when projects miss their budgets. (A spokesman at Gehry Partners in Southern California wouldn’t comment for this story.) Zahner thinks a Gehry-designed arena would stand as a work of art. “If you have the chance to have Picasso paint your living room and you can afford it, wouldn’t you do it?” he asks.

Even Ellerbe’s Smith concedes that hiring Gehry is a tantalizing notion. “Make no mistake: Frank Gehry is probably at this point the most famous designer in the world. You’ve seen his work. He’s Frank Gehry.”

The design team can argue, though, that the Gehry brand is diluted. Since Bilbao, Gehry’s profile is so high that he’s designing a bottle for a Polish vodka. A Gehry arena in Kansas City would unlikely be one of a kind; the owner of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets has hired the architect to design an arena in Brooklyn.

Yet the design team has dilution problems of its own. Murphy questions how well four firms can do one job. “Who takes the lead?” he asks. “Who’s in charge?”

Smith says the team is already working well together. He calls the collaboration an “amazing process.” He adds, “It’s been very interesting to get to know these people, to get to know your competitors and to focus on one common goal. We truly are a team.”

Proebstle, however, has a different explanation for HOK and Ellerbe’s decision to work together.

“They’re scared,” he says.