It’s been a long, dismal spring of record-breaking stadium subsidies making their way through state legislatures (not to mention other even more dismal stuff), so let’s have some fresh vaportecture as a respite from all the horror! And it’s for the proposed Chicago Fire stadium, which will allegedly be built entirely with the team owner’s own money. (The overall development itself will get a ton of tax kickbacks, but we won’t think about that right now.) Roll it!
Okay, sure, that’s fine enough. The stadium looks like a stadium, the sun is actually setting in the west at game time, nobody spelled the city’s name wrong. I do have some questions about what appears to be a practice (or youth?) field next to the stadium and whether all those tents and people walking on it before the game won’t destroy the turf and make it unplayable, but as these things go, that’s a minor quibble.
Likewise, let’s look at everything the interior image got right: There are 11 players on each team, and no one is reacting to the exciting play on the pitch by standing up and holding a scarf to face the back rows. And what exciting play it is: A Fire player looks to have just dribbled an opposing defender so ferociously that the defender just straight-up face-planted on the pitch, leaving the Fire player open for a likely goal. Too bad so many of the photographers lining the field seem to be looking in the wrong direction to get any good photos of the play, but you can’t have everything.
Okay, now you’re talking! What on earth kind of act is this that involves one guitar player and one dancer (?) while a sparsely arranged crowd generally pays no attention to the stage, despite it being lit by multiple spotlights? Is this what future stadium shows will look like now that currently popular artists are all canceling stadium gigs because they can’t sell enough tickets?
Anything else? Overblown quotes from team officials, perhaps?
Fire president Dave Baldwin told the Sun-Times the team wanted the design to harken back to “the City of Broad Shoulders” and its “rich industrial manufacturing heritage.”
“It has that Chicago warehouse feel, but also has a little bit of an enduring elegance to it — the brick facade, the steel, the glass, those are all things that were really important to Joe as we designed this,” Baldwin said. “Whether it’s opening day in 2028, or you fast forward 50 years and you come back to the stadium, it should still feel relevant to Chicago.”
Sure, brick, glass, steel, all things that scream “Chicago.” Or, you know, Baltimore. It probably would be too much to expect a stadium incorporating deep-dish pizza or sausages made of dead rats into its façade, but we’ll have to take what we can get.
As Baldwin noted, the projected opening date is 2028. That’s pretty aggressive given that it’s already halfway through 2025 and Chicago isn’t exactly known for its balmy winters and all-year construction schedules, but we can’t entirely rule it out.
Gotta appreciate MLS’s commitment to the single entity bit. Even the interiors of its new stadiums look exactly the same as one another. There’s no “there” there with these venues.
As a non-architect, I’m struggling to come up with too many creative ways to put two tiers of stands around the four sides of a rectangle. Maybe you can.
But it’s not just MLS – that’s basically the look of most soccer stadiums around the world that aren’t for the biggest clubs.
Perhaps to honor the team name, the upper deck can burn to cinders each match?
I am pretty confident that that is Ike & Tina wailing for all they are worth. Just goes to show, you can book any act (no matter their, um, status…) if you have the right venue.
Look, I’m not saying there aren’t obstacles to an Ike & Tina reunion tour… some more significant than others, but as that great semi-Chicagoan (hey, he was born in a rural area that if you squint hard enough you might call “around Peoria”) Carl Sandburg said:
“nothing happens unless first a dream”.
What? You gonna argue with Carl Sandburg?? In Illinois???
“That’s pretty aggressive given that it’s already halfway through 2025 and Chicago isn’t exactly known for its balmy winters and all-year construction schedules, but we can’t entirely rule it out.”
Your comment doesn’t make any sense. Do you really believe construction projects stop in the winter?
Depending on what stage of construction, yes, they absolutely do. It’s tough to do outdoor work when your site is covered by a foot of snow.
Notwithstanding the old joke that “There are two seasons in Chicago, winter and construction,” work on a stadium wouldn’t have to stop entirely in the winter, but it would slow down more than in warm-weather cities. Most stadiums take about three years to build, and the Fire stadium hasn’t even progressed past the pretty-pictures stage, so spring 2028 seems optimistic.
For what it’s worth, their last soccer-specific stadium (the one in Bridgeview) took 558 days from groundbreaking to opening. There were two winters in there.
BUT obviously (if you’ve ever been there), it was not as involved as this one appears to be, there’s a difference between building out of the urban core (Bridgeview is about 15 miles from The 78, it looks like) and building in the South Loop.
Chicago doesn’t get large snowfalls very often. That’s the other side of Lake Michigan.
Construction on large concrete structures in Chicago doesn’t pause unless there’s high wind or the most extreme cold.
Skyscrapers get built just as fast as in warm weather cities, and those are more complex than a stadium.
Also the overall development has canceled most of the remaining TIF. Red Line Station, Metra Realignment, Clark Street Renovations are officially gone to eliminate financing obstacles.
Related Midwest is legitimately aiming for 2028 completion.