Follow the bouncing ball

Latter-day stadium designs are like the settings on a Cuisinart - multi-purpose.

You heard of a retractable roof? Behold NFL’s Arizona Cardinals field, which can be slid outside the stadium like a rug when concerts and conventions occur. In the words of design architect Peter Eisenman, a stadium is a place not only to play ball, but also to bring people to the area to visit.

In that case, the Raymond James Stadium, home to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is a tourist destination in excelsis. In fact, when it was picked for the Super Bowl XLIII some five years ago, the reported reasons for the pick were the area’s beaches, balmy air, Busch Gardens and booming downtown nightlife.

Noticeably missing from the media list was the field of play. The fact that the National Football League Players Association calls it the best playing field in the league – owing to its Bermuda sodden surface – didn’t come up.

Are you getting this? The diversions, not the designs are what count. Which makes Raymond James less a ballpark and more a theme park on the order of the Magic Kingdom. Case in pointlessness: A $3 million, 103-foot-long, 43-ton pirate ship, docked behind one of the end zones, fires eight cannons when the Bucs make touchdowns. Also on parade: a monstrous 9-foot wooden skull with red eyes and smoke coming out of its mouth. There may be no better model of Floridian fun-seeking than the Raymond James.

But wait, there’s more. The sports arena showcases a contact sport of another kind: shopping. A 20,000 square-foot pirate village and a mock fishing village, plus an assortment of beach-hut kiosks full of concessions, re-create the mall experience.

And the field? It’s a veritable shrine to the god of fun: television. Two whopping, 92-foot-wide, high-definition videoboards called BucVision – standing like altars to merriment – one in each end zone, render the 400-foot-long grassland a sports bar of Cyclopean proportions.

And therein lies the problem with latter-day stadium architecture. It’s just another giant mall.