Bryan Trubey, the American architect who designed the new Dallas
Cowboys stadium, has hailed the prospective new home of English
Premier League club Liverpool as a triumph.
Trubey led his company HKS’ design of a
new stadium for the club, owned by American businessmen George
Gillett and Tom Hicks. Hicks also owns the Texas Rangers Major
League Baseball franchise and has worked extensively with
HKS.
“We’ve worked with Tom for over ten years, so I have a
relationship with him like I did with (Dallas Cowboys owners) the
Jones family,” said Trubey. “He’s always been a visionary owner
that’s totally open to almost anything, and so it was the same kind
of experience and you can see the same quality of design work is
playing itself out.”
In the case of Liverpool’s new stadium, the construction of
which is currently delayed by the club’s failure to secure funding,
that manifests itself in The Kop, a standalone behind-goal stand
with 18,500 seats. The Kop at Liverpool’s current stadium, Anfield,
has carried the name since 1906, and is probably the most famous
soccer stand in the world.
“Creating a venue that’s supportive of the team that’s there but
intimidating to those that visit it is one of the key elements of
design,” added Trubey. “You can see it a lot in the Liverpool
design – as much as in anything we’ve done – the big design driver
is The Kop. Man, what a spiritual experience the first time I went
to a game there. That group of fans is over the top and unique in
the world, and it was an instant inspiration to me to drive the
whole design off of that. We obviously had to do a lot of things to
be sensitive to the park and the community with exterior form too,
and we’ve done that. But that powerful group of fans, that’s
probably the number one most phenomenal experience I’ve had in
sport globally. I’ve been to a lot of places in the world, but that
was easily the number one experience.”
Within hours of leaving his first game at Anfield, Trubey had
drawn up sketches including what he describes as a “monolithic
structure, disproportionately large.” The rest of the stadium,
which will hold a total of 60,000 seated fans, is distinctive in
itself, but Trubey makes no secret of the fact that he sees The Kop
as unique.
“Some ideas happen over time, because they’re more complicated,
but some are like an epiphany and they seem so right that you’d
almost have to ignore them not to listen to them,” he said. “That
whole thing is a good example of how a really good designer or
architect can enhance an existing experience that’s evolved over a
hundred years, take it into a new building and put it on
steroids.”
Despite the continuing delays, the design concept itself was,
according to Trubey, a triumph for the company. “Although they’re
having a little bit of difficulty – like everybody is right now –
with financing, that was a hugely successful project for us. It’s
gotten a lot of critical and popular praise.”