Construction workers continue work in the bowl of the NFL stadium rising in Inglewood, Calif., Tuesday, July 30, 2019. The multi-billion-dollar complex is on schedule to open in July 2020. Officials from the NFL, the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers toured the stadium as part of early preparations for the Super Bowl in February 2022. (AP Photo/Greg Beacham)

The exterior of the football stadium under construction in Inglewood, Calif., Tuesday, July 30, 2019. The complex is on schedule to open in July 2020. NFL officials toured the complex as part of early preparations for the Super Bowl in February 2022. (AP Photo/Greg Beacham)

Sound The gallery will resume in seconds

Construction workers continue work in the bowl of the NFL stadium rising in Inglewood, Calif., Tuesday, July 30, 2019. The multi-billion-dollar complex is on schedule to open in July 2020. Officials from the NFL, the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers toured the stadium as part of early preparations for the Super Bowl in February 2022. (AP Photo/Greg Beacham)

Los Angeles Rams chief operating officer Kevin Demoff speaks to reporters on the south concourse above the bowl of the NFL stadium rising in Inglewood, Calif., Tuesday, July 30, 2019. The multi-billion-dollar complex is on schedule to open in July 2020. Officials from the NFL, the Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers toured the stadium as part of early preparations for the Super Bowl in February 2022. (AP Photo/Greg Beacham)

An artist’s rendering of the ‘Level 3 southeast seating’ at the new football stadium under construction at the former site of Hollywood Park in Inglewood. (Photo courtesy of HKS Architects)



INGLEWOOD — The countdown has begun. Some time in the next year, probably at some point in July, 2020, the Inglewood Stadium and Entertainment District at Hollywood Park will be ready to open its doors, welcome Southern Californians inside and, presumably, knock their socks off.

By then, that clunky, more-than-a-mouthful description likely will be replaced by a corporate title in a whopping naming rights deal. But a stadium grand enough to redefine the already overworked term “state of the art” deserves a cool nickname, doesn’t it?

In This Space, we’ve referred to it affectionately as the StanleyDome, after the guy whose vision and net worth brought this project to life, Rams’ owner Stan Kroenke.

One problem with that: Technically, it won’t be a dome. The transparent plastic roof more closely resembles a canopy, covering from the top but leaving the sides open to allow airflow. It is an indoor/outdoor venue, which fits this region perfectly.

“This is so uniquely Los Angeles when you think of the indoor/outdoor flow as we sit here and feel the breeze,” Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ executive vice president of football operations, said Tuesday from a perch overlooking what will eventually be the south end zone.

“You’re going to feel like you’re outside sitting here in the breeze, and I think for those of us Angelenos who have gotten used to sitting on our patios and hanging out and having dinner or watching events or gathering, it’s going to feel just like that no matter where you are in the building.”

“The Patio” it is, then. Perfect.

To the NFL representatives who showed up Tuesday to check on the project’s progress, 19 months before the stadium is scheduled to host Super Bowl LVI, call it impressive. The building itself, which will become the home of the Rams and Chargers in 2020, is maybe 70 percent complete. The surrounding campus at the 298-acre location – which ultimately will include a 6,000-seat performance venue, lakes, plazas, office space, hotel rooms, shopping, dining and residential developments and the new home of the NFL’s in-house media operations – is as yet an unfulfilled vision. But it’s coming.

“We’ve been lucky to be in a number of new stadiums lately for the Super Bowl,” said Peter O’Reilly, the league’s executive vice president for club business and league events. “But this will take it to another level and raise the bar in terms of what you can do, around what should be a really unique day and week.”

Consider: The last two Super Bowls were in Minneapolis and Atlanta, impressive new stadiums certainly but located in urban environments and thus limited in how they could center the myriad number of league events that surround the NFL’s championship game. In the hours before the Rams-Patriots Super Bowl last Feb. 4, for example, Atlanta’s downtown streets were clogged with people: both ticket-holders and those who just wanted to be part of the scene.

That probably won’t be an issue here.

Until then, of course, it will be the NFL’s second two-team home, and a very elaborate one at that: a 70,000-seat crib (expandable to 100,000 for Super Bowls and other one-off events) that will demonstrate how technology can make a transition from one home team to the other as easy as pushing some buttons.

“When they first built the Giants/Jets stadium (in New Jersey), they would have to go around the morning of a game and turn every picture around and redo all the team stores,” Chargers chief of staff Fred Maas said. “In our case, it’s all been planned to accommodate that. We’ll be able to flip a switch. On one Sunday it’ll be a Rams stadium, the next Sunday it’ll be a Chargers stadium, and no one will know the difference.”

When the roof is locked into place and the 70,000-square foot, two-sided circular scoreboard is suspended from that ceiling – expected to be done by next spring – then we might truly have a sense of the scope of this stadium.

Related Articles Rams’ Cam Akers will miss Bills game, testing running-back rotation

Rams’ Robert Woods revisits Buffalo and mixed memories

Rams’ Sean McVay, Bills’ Sean McDermott match wits again

Rams’ Troy Hill, other pass defenders making the right moves

Rams running backs Cam Akers, Malcolm Brown fighting injuries The goal when everything is complete, as Demoff put it, is for this to be “this great venue that’s so modern that it can flip (personalities) at any time, but also (is) not to be so soulless that people walk in and feel it’s this very monolithic drab building that’s white … When you look at the steel architecture, the swooping lines, the glass, this is a place people are going to walk in and be blown away.”

It will almost certainly be the new target in the game of “Can You Top This,” the standard for other teams or cities to attempt to match or surpass.

And it’s worth noting that The Patio – see how smoothly that works? – will also be the fourth major privately-funded sports facility built in greater L.A. in the last six decades, along with Dodger Stadium (1962), the Forum (1968) and Staples Center (1999).

Maybe the owners and politicians with their insatiable appetites for public funding should be trying to top that, too.

jalexander@scng.com

@Jim_Alexander on Twitter