Professional football and fine art seem about as well suited to each other as a tall boy of Bud Light and a tin of really expensive caviar. Which is why it may surprise you to learn that the new Mercedes-Benz stadium currently under construction in Atlanta, Georgia will feature not only 100 yards of turf, but also over 100 works of specially commissioned art work. Some will even be record breaking: The entryway will feature the largest statue of a bird — a falcon, naturally — in the entire world.

The stadium will cost $1.5 billion — $200 million of which is coming from taxpayers — and is set to open in 2017. It will be the home field of both the Atlanta Falcons and the Major League Soccer team Atlanta United, two organizations owned by Arthur M. Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot. The AMB Group is putting together the art collection with the help of the Savannah College of Art and Design; the school commissioned pieces from 53 internationally acclaimed artists, 48% of whom are Georgia-based.

Mike Egan, senior vice president and general counsel of the AMB Group, was as surprised as anyone when the idea first got floated by him. Art? At a football stadium? Isn’t that counterintuitive?

“I couldn’t agree more,” Egan said. “But we did joint polling with SCAD, and we were both very surprised at how many fans had visited art institutions within a year prior to the time we were doing the polling. There was a high level of enthusiasm in the people we spoke to about art.”

One of the methods for gauging interest included sending SCAD students out into tailgates and concourses before Falcons games with an interactive poll on iPads. It’s a beautiful image, really: art students sidestepping grills to ask tong-wielding, face-painted fans if they’d been to a museum recently and what kind of visuals they prefer. Of the 1,200 people questioned, enough were into the idea of an art collection at the stadium that plans moved forward.

The initiative starts to make more sense when you think about what Blank and the AMB Group want their shiny new building to be, which is something more than just a place where 10 football and 17 soccer games occur each year. Egan said the whole complex is designed to give people a reason to leave the comfort of their dens and living rooms. The huge investment — Egan called it significant, but declined to give exact numbers — in art is a bid to create a more holistic experience.

“We almost hesitate to call it a stadium,” Egan said. “We think of it as an entertainment venue. The art experience ties in with the architecture of the building, and it’s all about creating an atmosphere that gets people off of their sofas, out from in front of their sixty-inch TVs, and excited and energized about coming into the building. We think art plays a huge roll in that.”

This is not the first stadium to incorporate art into its plans — the Marlins did so when they completed their new venue in 2012. And Mercedes-Benz won’t be home to the most avant garde art in the world; Egan said that the collection is veering away from the abstract and toward bold, comprehensible pieces. These will be populist works, meant to hold attention and draw people in.

Mercedes-Benz and SCAD plan to do so by building big. The giant falcon that will sit in front of the stadium is the brainchild of Hungarian artist Gábor Miklós Szőke, and will rise 41.5 feet above the asphalt, with a wingspan of over 64 feet. To put that in perspective, that’s about the size of a four story building.

Szőke, who’s designed other sculptures for sporting venues in Europe, started the design process by observing the movements of actual falcons. He then came up with the plans, working with structural engineers to ensure that the bird would be fundamentally sound. Speaking by phone through a translator from Budapest, Szőke explained the process of building this giant contraption out of stainless steel, concrete, and bronze.

“It will be produced in Budapest,” Szőke said, “and then there will be 40-foot containers which will ship the structural elements to Atlanta. It will go through installation at the stadium, and will take two months. By the end of it, over 100 people will have worked on the falcon.”

While the falcon stands for the NFL team, and a 53-foot-high mirrored soccer ball by Studio Roso of London for the MLS franchise, other works will pay homage to the city itself. A huge painting by Atlanta artist Radcliffe Bailey will honor Atlanta’s rich history of historically black colleges and universities. It will be somewhat of a collage, and incorporate eight or so old photographs from HBCUs that Bailey found from 1919.

“I’m looking at drawing those connections between sports and the community,” Bailey said. “But to sports at a time when it was used in a different way. Back then, it was an important part of the community, it was a place where people gathered. Because at the time, things were segregated, and athletics were a realm in which the HBCUs flourished and they did well.”

All of the art will be displayed throughout the entire stadium. Egan said it was important to the ownership that the works occupy not just places where only wealthy people have access, like the clubs and suites, but where those with the cheapest tickets can see them, too. The pieces will therefore sit or hang on every level, from the main concourses, to the premium seats, to the nosebleeds. Much like the prices at concession stands, where it will be possible to feed a family of four for under $28, the art is meant to be a communal experience no matter your income level.

“This ties very much into the way Arthur and this organization thinks about our fans,” Egan said. “He wanted something where the art would be part of the experience of everyone in the building, not just the people buying the most expensive seats.”

The artwork will get a huge number of eyeballs once it’s actually installed, seeing as there are big things planned for the stadium. Atlanta is set to host the Super Bowl in 2019, the NCAA Final Four in 2020, and the 2018 College Football Playoff Championship game. And perhaps, with this new initiative, it’s only a matter of time before Art Basel leaves Miami and heads to Georgia, too.