For Nats' Home, a Rapid Ascent
Corner-Free Clubhouse Among Unusual Details in Ballpark on Anacostia River

By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 11, 2007

During the 2005 baseball season, long before construction began on a stadium for the Washington Nationals, architect Marshall Purnell and others involved in the project toured SBC Park, now AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.

The stadium, overlooking San Francisco Bay, was five years old then and "just really beautiful," Purnell recalled recently, as he strolled the now-bustling site where the Nationals' ballpark is taking shape. Work on the stadium in Southeast Washington has come a long way since spring, and as Purnell offered an update on the progress and described details of the design, he spoke of a lesson he learned in San Francisco.

The one aspect of the Giants' ballpark that gave him pause, he said, was the ordinary, rectangular layout of the home team's clubhouse.

"They were showing us Barry Bonds's locker," said Purnell, referring to the Giants' slugging left fielder, an aloof and imperious figure who is close to breaking the major league record for career home runs.

"Barry being the star that he is, he had grabbed a whole corner of the locker room and claimed it for himself," Purnell said. "He was all spread out over there. He had his big La-Z-Boy reclining chair and everything set up. It was his space."

Purnell said it occurred to him then that in building a ballpark, a detail seemingly as inconsequential as the shape of a clubhouse could influence the way teammates related to one another and how they performed as a unit over a long season. As a result, when the Nationals settle into their new locker room next year, they won't find any corners.

"We decided we'd make it circular," said Purnell, to help discourage cliques and hierarchies among the mega-rich stars and lesser-paid journeymen and younger players who typically compose a big league team. "Then we decided on an oval," he said, because "the oval has to do with the city. You have the Ellipse, you have the Oval Office.

"It's a Washington thing," he said. And it's an all-for-one, one-for-all thing: "If you have a circular table," he noted, "then there is no head of the table."

Nine months after D.C. officials posed with shovel blades attached to Louisville Sluggers in a ceremonial groundbreaking for the project, Purnell and other experts responsible for bringing the Nationals' ballpark to fruition led a tour of the busy construction site along the Anacostia River. They shared anecdotes, including the clubhouse story, and declared themselves delighted with the progress since May.

As always with the stadium plan, though, uncertainties linger.

Will the bitterly debated, publicly funded project stay within the $611 million spending cap set by the D.C. Council? As for economic development, ballpark proponents envision a retail, residential and office-space boom generated by the stadium in the stagnant blocks near South Capitol Street and Washington Navy Yard. But will a revival actually come to pass?

The issue of traffic also remains unsettled. Slightly more than 1,200 parking spaces will be available for premium-ticket holders in three soon-to-be built garages. But to accommodate a sellout crowd in the 41,000-seat stadium, planners say, as many as 8,000 more spaces will be needed for fans who don't use Metro.

And what will the finished product be called? Who will buy the naming the rights, and for how much?

So many unknowns.

Except for this: Bolt by bolt, beam by beam, the stadium is going up.

The ballpark's steel and concrete skeleton grows larger by the workday, rising in a once-forgotten pocket of the city about a mile south of the U.S. Capitol, beyond the view of commuters on most major routes in and out of the District. Allen Y. Lew, chief executive of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, which is overseeing the project, joked that some people might consider the massive building effort to be just a rumor.

"But as you can see," said Lew, standing atop a frigid, wind-swept bluff, looking down at the stadium's future left field, "it is real."

Below him, amid piles of building materials and a half-dozen towering cranes, workers were bundled against the cold, trudging on a rutted, frozen tundra of dirt and stones that eventually will be a lush expanse of outfield sod. In the distance, past a still-imaginary infield, past where home plate and the base lines will be next year, other workers labored on three levels of seating decks that make the project look like what it is: a big league stadium.

"Absolutely it'll be done on time," said Tony Robinson, spokesman for the sports commission. The ballpark is due to be ready for Opening Day a year from April. "It'll be done well before that," Robinson said. "They have to get the staff in there and get them trained."

In the District, which has no significant industrial heritage, ballpark designers eschewed the now-familiar retro look -- the red brick and ornate ironwork prevalent in stadiums built since the early 1990s in one-time factory cities such as Baltimore and Cleveland. The exterior of the Nationals' ballpark will feature glass and concrete made to resemble limestone and granite, in keeping with Washington's federal buildings and monuments.

Before the concrete-and-steel construction phase going on now, officials said, workers excavated nearly 341,000 cubic yards of soil at the site and drove about 2,400 pilings into the ground, each 55 feet deep, for the stadium's foundation. The mechanical-electrical-plumbing phase is set to begin soon, with workers installing about nine miles of pipes, 600,000 pounds of ducts and more than 3 million feet of power lines.

Workers are scheduled to finish enclosing the structure in the spring, officials said. The clubhouses (the visitors' locker room will be rectangular) are to be completed over the summer, and work will begin in August on the playing field and drainage system. The huge main scoreboard, not yet fully designed, is slated to go up in September.

In the fall and winter, officials said, workers will put finishing touches on the ballpark's restaurants, offices and premium seating areas, including 78 luxury suites.

The process is called "fast-track design." It is meant to save time. With an ordinary project -- an office building, for example -- architects would design every aspect of the structure before turning over the finished plans to contractors. But because the ballpark project is under a tight deadline, architects are turning over plans for each phase of the project as soon as the designs are ready, so the builders can keep busy.

Purnell's Washington architectural firm, Devrouax & Purnell, which is working on its first stadium project, is teamed with the Kansas City, Mo., firm of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, or HOK, which has designed 10 of the 14 newest major league stadiums.

In the beginning, Purnell said, architects gave construction companies general plans for the project's major structural elements "so that everyone understood the concept." Then they turned over detailed plans for the first phase -- the pilings and foundation -- so contractors could get to work. Since then, he said, architects have completed designs for several more phases, including the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.

As workers continue with the concrete-and-steel phase, laboring outdoors in the winter freeze, architects are months ahead, Purnell said, focusing on details of the clubhouses that will be finished this summer, especially the Nationals' locker room, with its elaborate video-scouting system, physical fitness center and other amenities for the players.

"It's kind of fun to remember how these projects have evolved over the years," said Joe Spear, a principal designer for HOK who is working closely with Purnell's firm on the Washington ballpark. "I can remember when teams really didn't want to invest a lot of dough into making the clubhouse a great place for a player to spend time. But we've seen that change to where teams really want the players to be comfortable."

It helps performance, he said. And so does a sense of unity.

Thus the clubhouse in the round.

"You don't want a niche where two or three players can get off by themselves and create their own little world," Spear said. "You want them to feel they're part of a team."