The American stadium is in retreat.

Across sports, broad swaths of unoccupied seats have become a common sight. The reasons why can be debated — the cost of attendance is rising, fans are busier with other forms of entertainment, or many simply prefer watching from a bar or a couch than a stadium seat — but the sinking numbers at the gate can’t be denied. And teams seem to be out of ideas on how to make the stadium atmosphere more enticing.

When the Cleveland Indians opened Jacobs Field in 1994, it was packed to capacity on a daily basis, selling out 455 consecutive games from 1995 to 2001, even with an expansion to the stadium’s capacity in 1996 because of this overwhelming demand. By 2015, the club, despite a run that included multiple playoff appearances leading up to an American League pennant in 2016, removed thousands of oft-unsold seats for the installation of still-rarely-used “party decks.” This story isn’t unique to Cleveland. Multiple clubs have actively reduced seating, and where a capacity over 45,000 was once commonplace, new stadium proposals rarely top 30,000.

Nowhere is the gap between possibility and reality more clear than in baseball, the sport with the most room for innovation in design and capacity to fill, with 30 teams playing 81 home games a year. The sport’s non-standard field of play should mean more unique experiences for fans, yet few teams are daring enough to take advantage.

Meanwhile, the retro-nostalgic trend in baseball park design started by Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992 has grown stale. A familiar palette of materials and grab-bag of design touches has shown up in new ballparks everywhere, like brick and stone, quirky-for-quirk’s sake outfield angles, and historicist allusions to baseball’s supposed Golden Age. While a few stadiums — notably Miami’s Marlins Park, which we’ll get to later — have bucked convention, there’s little separating a Comerica Park from a Nationals Park, or a Great American Ballpark from a Citizens Bank Park.

Meanwhile, the way we consume sports is changing. Cities and teams continue to pour billions of dollars into stadium-building projects, but the final products aren’t keeping up with the times. Architects may talk a good game about what their designs will do for a team or community, but they’re not achieving their goals. Teams seem to have lost any sense of adventure. Instead, modern stadium design has reacted to falling attendance by getting smaller instead of getting better.

This is personal for me: I’m an architect myself, and my love of sports and stadiums is a big reason why. From the moment I started following baseball in earnest, right when Cleveland’ moved to that new ballpark and became one of the most exciting teams in baseball, I believed a great stadium design could make a great team. I’d fill notebooks with sketches of audacious designs I believed could change the game forever. (I could have saved baseball in Montreal, if only they’d listened to a teen from Ohio.) When I did a career-shadowing trip to an architecture firm as a high-school freshman and saw not-yet-public drawings for what would become Milwaukee’s Miller Park, I was hooked.

As of yet, no one has asked me to design a ballpark. But after seeing stadium after stadium be built around slight variations on the same model, I’m taking matters into my own hands. This is a design manifesto for how we can face the future, tear apart the old assumptions, and re-envision a stadium for a new world.

Don’t just talk about community buy-in; let the community buy in

In 2018, before exploring alternate plans such as a time-share with Montreal, the Tampa Bay Rays optimistically pitched a new park in Tampa’s Ybor City neighborhood. In describing the design, the Rays claimed the venue would be “of, by and for the people of Tampa Bay.” Community engagement is a common refrain in presentations like this, and the Rays are far from the first team to suggest a closer relationship with the public. I don’t see anything in the Ybor stadium design to suggest it will create one, though. It’s a fairly standard design that is admittedly prettier than their moribund current home, Tropicana Field, but doesn’t address the fundamentals of fan support.

Fans want to feel that the club has bought into them, and a bolder model of fan engagement could give them a real stake in the club’s success. One of the most promising recent trends in North American sports is the way soccer clubs are emulating their European counterparts by developing dedicated supporters’ groups. These independent organizations drive enthusiasm and energy in the ballpark, and make sure seats stay filled.

Instead of just acknowledging and tolerating the supporter group model, we’re going to encourage and codify it in the park’s architecture by giving over control of entire sections of the ballpark to fans. Rather than design the seating sections and concourse as a finished product, we’ll offer it up as a framework for fan-driven organizations to introduce their own visions.

Prime sections of the ballpark will be designed only up to a minimum level of basic infrastructure, giving fans a shell for customization, just as a developer might prepare spaces in a new building awaiting tenants. Each supporters’ group will be given a frontage on the concourse and a frontage to the field, and relatively free rein to create their vision in between. Type and configuration of seating, manner of distribution of tickets, even operations of concessions would be delegated to these groups. Cushy seats or hard bleachers? Scrap both for standing rails? Favor a first-come-first-serve daily admissions, or a program that rewards perfect attendance with seating preference? It’s up to you, the fans.

Not only would this allow for a more diverse and authentic character of public-facing elements, it would make filling seats a matter of community pride. Your group won’t want to be the one that can’t bring a crowd on a Tuesday night, nor the one that can’t add something to the gameday atmosphere. The message would be clear: bring your vision to the ballpark, but bring your friends, too.

Throw open the gates

The relationship between teams and their surrounding urban environment — good or bad — has created some of the most memorable and familiar features in ballpark design. Fenway Park’s iconic 37-foot-high “Green Monster” wall in left field began in part as a spite fence to prevent freeloaders from watching games from nearby buildings. Wrigley Field’s rooftop viewing sections represent the (eventual, grudging) concession to that same kind of viewing. While those examples are more than a century old, the tension between teams and towns remains.

“Any time someone else puts something outside our front door, it’s going to have an adverse impact on our business,” explained Atlanta Braves president of development Mike Plant in 2016 while outlining the massive team-controlled development project accompanying the club’s move from downtown Atlanta to an undeveloped field in suburban Cobb County. This is a business strategy, but it’s not community engagement. It’s community imitation, creating a context to fit one’s own needs and walling off the city outside.

We’re going to take a different approach: we’re throwing open the gates, and offering the stadium up to the street. Instead of simply using design touches to emulate surrounding buildings, we’ll erase the distinction between stadium and surround, and put the backs of those supporters’ sections towards the street. We can’t have cars on a concourse, so a series of pedestrianized streets — like those that have been successfully implemented in urban developments like Las Vegas’s Fremont Street, Kansas City’s Power and Light District, or Louisville’s Fourth Street Live — can place the park smack-dab in the middle of a vibrant, multi-use entertainment district, developed with the same open-handed, community-led process as the park itself.

Will some people be able to catch a glimpse of the game without buying a seat? Sure. The club can make money back by leasing land to the businesses drawn in by that activity. And on slow game days, the district can support the ballpark by bringing in people who might decide to catch a couple innings over a beer after dinner at a nearby restaurant. When the ballpark is bursting at the seams for a playoff game? The crowd can flow through the entire district, expanding the ballpark’s capacity greatly.

For once, a new ballpark can be an organic part of the city, rather than just echo of it.

Consider all the angles

Baseball is not just an in-person product; it’s also a television product, and the design of a ballpark should take careful consideration of the game will be seen on screen. Tens of thousands might see a game from inside the stadium, but millions may see it from the narrow view of a handful of camera lenses.

When the New York Yankees opened their updated version of Yankee Stadium in 2009, their inaugural year attendance was perfectly healthy: more than 45,000 fans a game, filling 87 percent of the stadium’s capacity, second only to the Los Angeles Dodgers in total attendance. The only thing it seemed like anyone could talk about, though, were all the empty seats behind home plate. The stadium’s so-called “Legends Suite” seating selling plush seats with private club access to the city’s most well-heeled fans was, and is, a cash cow. Having rarely-filled captain’s chairs in the most visible location in the park, though, was a terrible public face for a franchise that was beginning to resemble an aloof luxury brand more than a baseball club with a passionate fanbase.

Even beyond that especially egregious example, the television viewer’s dominant perspective — that is, the center-field camera view of a stadium — can either make a stadium seem like an appealing destination or a sterile mausoleum. As a young viewer, I loved the sight of the hometown crowd visible over low brick wall behind home plate at Wrigley Field. Conversely, the high blank wall at Minneapolis’s Metrodome gave the impression no one was at the game. Surely teams benefit from filling their best seats with people willing to pay a premium, but that cash grab shortchanges the television audience, which sees a muted front or the same staid group of people again and again (looking at you, Marlins Man).

Programs like ESPN’s College GameDay, NBC’s Today, and countless televised political rallies know what stadium designers often seem to forget: Putting your strongest supporters where the cameras are, and making their fervor the first thing anyone sees, makes for better television. We’ll place a seat-free tier of grandstands directly behind home plate. Every game will have a lively crowd for the broadcast, refreshed daily via ticket lottery, rewarding a new crop of avid rooters with a once-in-a-lifetime view.

Un-level the playing field

In theory, if seldom in practice, one of the primary goals of a baseball team is to win games. Oddly, many new ballparks work directly against this goal. To many ownership groups and the design teams they employ, winning is clearly a secondary concern at best.

“It doesn’t hold noise or home-team fervor anywhere near the way the old place did,” Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera said of the new Yankee Stadium in his autobiography, The Closer. “The old Stadium was our 10th man.” Cavernous new ballparks can’t contain or focus crowd noise, with fans spread far from the field and the best seats reserved for corporate interests.

The stadiums that have had notable home-field advantages in the past arose almost by happenstance. The deafening roar of Seattle’s Kingdome, on the rare occasions when it was full, was amplified by its ugly concrete dome, and the fact fans were virtually on top of the field in Detroit’s Tiger Stadium was a by-product of structural limitations of the era. The tricky outfield dimensions of Fenway Park or the short right-field porch at the original Yankee Stadium weren’t driven by an architect’s desire for novelties, but by the confines of the available sites.

An active approach to creating a home-field advantage has two primary elements: one, make it harder for your opponent to compete, and two, make it easier to build your team around the park’s dimensions. We’ll take two approaches to achieve this.

Many current and proposed stadiums have roofs. Whether fixed or retractable, a roof provides greater flexibility and year-round usability. But they’re rarely designed with acoustics in mind, and this is a missed opportunity. A stadium can’t make the crowd more raucous, but it can make it seem more raucous by capturing and channelling sound in a deliberate manner. Sculpting a roof structure that focuses sound right on the pitcher and hitter can amplify the crowd’s impact and make the game much harder for opposing players.

Meanwhile, a team can be built to an outfield — say, with a staff of fly-ball pitchers in a park with spacious dimensions, or a lineup of pull-hitters for a short corner porch. It’s not always easy to get the right roster for the park you have, though. Some teams try to tweak their dimensions yearly to address their personnel, but that leads to awkward gaps between fence and seats. The seams show, because tinkering was never considered in the original design.

In my park, it will be.

While the infield sides of the ballpark will be fixed, permanent structures, we can open the design to the outfield with a few permanent elements anchoring a space designed with flexibility in mind. Each year, the outfield can be rebuilt to suit the roster’s composition and the season’s needs, and show fans a fresh appearance that looks intentional rather than accidental.

Don’t just make a park, make a statement

A great ballpark isn’t just a place to play; it’s a destination. Countless people have made a lifetime goal out of seeing every one of baseball’s varied ballparks. But while many of the current parks are comfortable, perfectly pleasant places to enjoy a beer and a ballgame, fewer and fewer have truly indelible charm, an element you just have to see up close, like the ivy-covered walls at Wrigley Field, or the Green Monster in Boston. The restored Baltimore & Ohio Railroad warehouse behind right field at Camden Yards served this purpose as the retro ballpark craze started, but many ballparks have adopted pale imitations.

One park that tried something different was Miami’s Marlins Park, which was described during design by then-owner Jeffrey Loria as a place he wanted to be “different and experimental.” “I thought it was time for baseball to be innovative,” Loria said in an interview. The Miami Herald described Marlins Park glowingly as “a contemporary landmark of grand gestures.” It is beautiful, modern, unique — and mostly empty. It failed to meet the other points, most notably engagement with the fans and community. A fraught (and some might say corrupt) financing process and multiple fire-sale roster purges eroded fan buy-in, and a stadium alone can’t fix that. What Marlins Park did offer was sweeping views, clean modern lines, and one truly unique piece of local flair: a colorful animatronic home-run sculpture by artist Red Grooms that was promptly removed by new team owner Derek Jeter upon his purchase of the club in 2018.

Marlins Park may have failed to draw crowds so far, but it’s the closest a modern ballpark has come to defining a new era. We’re taking that one step further. Our defining feature has to be so present in the park’s design that no ex-shortstop owner, no matter how joyless, could remove it. The feature must be the design itself.

So far, we’ve developed our ballpark as if it is situated in the midst of a strong, functional, formal grid system. Now it’s time to rip that grid apart, bisecting it with a series of pedestrian pathways moving in flowing, organic patterns. These pathways will subdivide and re-link blocks, creating a variety of shapes, sizes and dynamic residual conditions. These pathways can flow from the streetscape concourse up to rooftop terraces and even higher, to structures that form the frame of the roof structure.

A place to walk can be an attraction in itself, like Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, Copenhagen’s Strøget, Paris’s Coulée verte René-Dumont, or New York City’s High Line. Offer people a compelling stroll, and they’ll come from far and wide to walk it. Dramatic views into a ballpark from above will be an enticement to stay and catch a ballgame, even if you’re someone who would otherwise have no interest in baseball.

Bring it all together

Rethinking a stadium isn’t just a matter of changing the field dimensions or facade materials. It’s a matter of breaking the stadium out of the box it’s been confined to for so long. In this conceptual design, we’re throwing open the gates and integrating the game-day experience into a whole neighborhood. We’re acknowledging the game isn’t just experienced in person, and that a well-crafted remote product can create fans who will come to the park in the future. We’re reminding ourselves that winning isn’t everything, but that it needs to be something. Finally, we’re weaving it together into a larger, grander experience, one that’ll bring visitors from far beyond the fanbase.

Would any baseball team take on this approach? Probably not. Teams tend to be risk-averse when it comes to how they build and fill their parks. The notion of opening up a stadium this dramatically flies in the face of a century of sports-profit thinking.

Architects, for their part, can only do what a client is willing to pay them to do, so it’s not surprising so many new stadiums amount to new clothes on the same beast. Designers shouldn’t be absolved, though. The way sports are consumed is always changing, and they can show teams how to build an environment that can evolve along with it.

A new way of doing things might only seem impossible until it’s done. Just as Camden Yards once did, one pioneering design can usher in a standard. If and when that happens, it’ll be a whole new ballpark for American sports.