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Dan Meis today revealed his vision for Everton's proposed new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock.

Here, in the first part of an exclusive interview, Meis sits down with the ECHO to discuss his designs, capacity, costs and being the face of the project.

Is there an aspect of the design you are most proud of?

“I hate using the word 'bowl' because some people have misunderstood that 'bowl' means round.

“I knew this from the very beginning, it didn't matter what the building looked like, in the end it had to feel as close, as tight and as intimidating as Goodison Park and I feel like we've really gotten to that.

“I don't think there is a seat that's further away from the pitch than it could absolutely be.

“Interestingly, and as much as I've looked at this over the last three years, it was just seeing the VR that affected me, it feels like Goodison, the roof is right there. It's not a big, expansive, multi-purpose stadium like I've seen elsewhere.”

How does the design help amplify the noise inside the stadium?

“It's as simple as that the fact there is not a lot of volume [meaning the space inside the stadium].

“The hardest thing about acoustics is when the sound has a long way to travel and a long way to bounce back.

“We had lots of reasons to try and keep the building tight and the roof low. Some of it was about sight lines across the Mersey, some of it was about the cost of building a stadium and the higher the stands. So everything we've done has been to try and keep the volume of the building as tight as possible and that will end up with noise, obviously.

“And one thing that gets lost in talking about stadium design is how important the fans are to the play of the game. The players really respond. No matter how good the team is, if you have a half full stadium it changes the way they play. They feed on it.

"It's been the biggest responsibility I have felt from the beginning, that it doesn't matter how great this looks, how iconic it is, how inexpensive we can do it or how expensive, it's about how you capture the magic of Goodison and bring it with you.”

You have, in many ways, become the face of the project – have you ever experienced that level of profile in a project before?

“No, I haven't. I don't know if it's the times have changed because of social media.

“I have designed a stadium for AS Roma and Serie A fans are pretty rabid and crazy, so I do get a lot of interaction, but not like this. This has been incredibly humbling because they have accepted me.

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"As an American it would be easy to say to me 'what do you know about football? You call it soccer!'. I could've gotten that.

“It took me a while before I learned what I could and couldn't say on Twitter. I learned not to comment about a play or a player but it's been fun because it has been a true interaction. Sometimes people are pretty aggressive 'it's got to be 70,000 or you don't have any ambition' or 'it's got to look like this' but when I pushed back it really has created a dialogue so, in lots of ways, I feel like I've been doing public consultation for a couple of years now.

"It's been unlike anything I've had in my entire career.”

The club are proposing an initial capacity of 52,000 – why do you believe that the right number?

“I think it is the right number for a lot of reasons. I don't mean this to sound flip, but I've never met anyone that said 'god I really hate that stadium – it was too small!'.

“When a stadium is loud and full, that experience is great and it doesn't matter if it's 40,000 like Juventus or 90,000 but it's got to be full.

“So to go from where we are at Goodison, to something much larger, would be a mistake and that's not to say there wouldn't be a lot of demand but I don't know if that's necessarily better. What I do know, architecturally, those last 10, 15, 20,000 seats they cost the most and they are not generating the (same) kind of revenue because they are furthest away from the pitch. There is a diminishing return, if you will.

"The revenue of a club is so complicated, it's not as simple as how many tickets you can sell, it's TV rights, it's jerseys, it's all kinds of things so for me it is about right-sizing.

“So that would be disregarding the site. On this site we're pretty tight and so there is a physical limit to how much we could build and I think that's good because it's part of what has driven us to what we've spoken about already, keeping the pitch tight and seats right on top of the pitch.

“I guess you could argue 'is 53 better than 52?' but I'm certainly an advocate, for now, that smaller – it's obviously a lot bigger than Goodison – is better.”

You've spoken in the past how the cost of stadiums could become prohibitive due to the demands and expectations of owners – was that applicable here?

“No, I don't think so because from the very beginning this owner, and through and through from the club, they didn't talk about revenue and why this was important.

“Obviously it is important to the future of the club and there is a revenue aspect of that but the focus was so much on 'this is about a new home for our fans' and something that should be as important to them as Goodison has been for 130 years.

“What I tend to get with a lot of projects is that clients aren't normally builders, they're owners of a football club or a baseball club so initially they will throw at me that they want everything because they think that is where the revenue is going to come from. So the buildings tend to grow, even if the capacity of the seating is the same, there are all kinds of things that get thrown in, and that is where the cost really gets out of control.

“But in this case, because we weren't being driven by a revenue model, we were being driven by an experience model, an emotion model and we were picking a site that requires a lot of investment that a normal site wouldn't. These were decisions that were really long-term future of the club and what is best for the city and so we haven't had that kind of problem here, which is really refreshing.

“If anything, it's about we know we have to invest a lot in making the dock build-able so we need to be as crafty and efficient as possible with what's left.”