Seats in sunset colours: AD explores Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles
In the "Inside History" series, planner Janet Marie Smith explains how the ballpark carved into Chavez Ravine in 1962 became a modernist icon.
Photo: Frederick Dennstedt from los angeles, usa / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · Architectural Digest · youtube.com
Architectural Digest has devoted a new episode of its video series "Inside History" to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. According to the video description, architect and urban planner Janet Marie Smith, the LA Dodgers' executive vice president of planning and development, guides viewers through the 1962 ballpark carved into Chavez Ravine. The episode covers its mid-century modern architecture and how the Downtown skyline developed in the stadium's view.
With 56,000 seats, the stadium is the third-oldest in Major League Baseball after Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, AD reports. Architect Emil Praeger arranged the seats in a gradient from yellow through orange and turquoise to sky blue – colours that, according to Smith, "mimic the sunset". The hexagonal signs bordering the field go back to sketches from 1959, some of them only completed in 2013. Outside the gates stand more than 100 planters shaped like martini glasses, and the Dodgers even employ a botanist.
Team president Walter O'Malley chose the site for its freeway access after the Dodgers left Brooklyn. According to PBS SoCal, groundbreaking was on 19 September 1959; 19 earthmovers shifted around eight million cubic yards of earth and rock. The opening on 10 April 1962 drew 52,564 fans. The site's history is contested: a never-built public housing project had earlier erased a Mexican American community from the ravine.