Ron Labinski; helped design the modern stadium, 85
Ron Labinski, a visionary architect who a half-century ago foresaw a market for modern single-sport stadiums and then helped design them, replacing look-alike concrete bowls that had often inelegantly housed both baseball and football teams, died Jan. 1 in Prairie Village, Kan. He was 85.
His wife, Lee (Beougher) Labinski, said the cause was frontotemporal dementia.
Mr. Labinski, who was believed to be the first architect in the United States to specialize in sports facilities, helped transform stadium design over 30 years, creating cozy, fan-friendly venues such as Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore and Oracle Park in San Francisco.
At the same time, his designs brought a critical source of new revenue to team owners with club seats, built as exclusive sections with access to climate-controlled lounges and restaurants.
“His forward thinking about how we watch games and how teams use their building, beyond what was happening on the field, was a real game-changer,” said Janet Marie Smith, who was a Baltimore Orioles executive when the team was planning Oriole Park, an urban ballpark with a retro brick exterior that was designed by HOK Sport, which Mr. Labinski helped found. Now 31 years old, Camden Yards is still considered one of the best early examples of the new wave of single-sport stadiums.
“He doesn’t get enough credit for putting the stake in the ground of the multipurpose stadium era,” Smith added.
Mr. Labinski helped usher in that era as the project architect of Arrowhead Stadium, which opened in 1972 as the home of the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and the companion to Kauffman Stadium, the home of MLB’s Royals. The facilities replaced a stadium that the Chiefs and Royals had shared.
While working on Arrowhead, Mr. Labinski started looking at the national landscape of aging, multipurpose stadiums — whose round shapes precluded good sightlines for many baseball and football fans — and saw opportunity. He listed all the MLB and NFL stadiums, the years they were built and when their leases expired, providing him with a guide to his future work.
“There was a huge bubble in the 1990s and a little past 2000, when all the lease agreements at these multipurpose stadiums were up,” Mr. Labinski told Sports Business Journal in 2010. “I recognized through all the conversations I was having with owners that the multipurpose stadiums were not the way they’d want to go in the future.”
His compendium became a to-do list for the next 30 years at architectural firms in Kansas City, most notably HOK Sport, a division of a St. Louis firm. (HOK Sport was renamed Populous in 2009 after a management buyout and Mr. Labinski’s retirement.)
He followed Arrowhead by designing Giants Stadium, which opened in the New Jersey Meadowlands in 1976 and became the home of the New York Giants and New York Jets until it was replaced by Met Life Stadium in 2010. He became friendly with Tim Mara, then the Giants’ co-owner, who introduced him to other NFL owners. And by attending NFL and MLB meetings, Mr. Labinski learned what teams might want in stadiums in the future.
For his design of Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., which opened in 1987 as the home of the Miami Dolphins, Mr. Labinski is credited with creating the category of club seats as a cheaper option for fans than expensive, enclosed luxury suites. Revenue from both the club seats and the suites helped Joe Robbie, then the Dolphins’ owner, finance the stadium’s construction.
“He greatly influenced the way NFL stadiums appeared from the 1990s through the 2000s, especially with respect to their seating bowls,” Earl Santee, a longtime colleague of Mr. Labinski’s and a senior principal at Populous, wrote in an e-mail, referring to the shape of the seating sections. “Lower seating bowls in NFL stadiums were formerly contiguous, but Ron had the idea to create ‘neighborhoods’ of fans, providing different experiences in different areas.”