Lucas Oil Stadium

There'll be Room for TDs,
Hoops, Meetings in New Arena

by Steve Kaelble

As the Indianapolis Colts rushed and passed their way through the football season toward the Super Bowl, construction workers hurried to make the team's new home ready for the 2008 home opener.

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Just south of the existing RCA Dome in downtown Indianapolis, Lucas Oil Stadium is becoming an imposing part of the skyline.
The project is part of a two-phase plan to improve downtown stadium and convention facilities.

Once the $675 million stadium is completed in summer 2008, the nearby RCA Dome will be demolished to make way for a $275 million expansion of the Indiana Convention Center, to be finished two years later. An enclosed walkway at street level is to connect the convention center with the new stadium, allowing large conventions and trade shows to spill over into the meeting and exhibition spaces built into the stadium and even the stadium floor itself.

The seven-level Lucas Oil will feature a retractable roof and seat 63,000 for football, according to the Indiana Stadium and Convention Building Authority.

The project's lead architect, Dallas-based HKS Inc., designed it with basketball in mind as well because as headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Indianapolis hosts NCAA Final Four basketball events every few years. Convention uses also were at the forefront of the designers' minds.

When it is complete, Lucas Oil will cover 1.8 million sq ft and include 142 corporate suites. Its football seating will be about 5,000 greater than the football seating at the RCA Dome, and it will beat its predecessor in numerous other measures, including the distance between rows, seat width and the fact that all seats are theater-style-no bleachers.

The new stadium will have twice the number of public toilet fixtures, concourses twice as wide, nearly double the number of concession stands, twice as many elevators, plus two pedestrian ramps and 14 escalators. (RCA has neither). Lucas will include 183,000 sq ft of exhibit space and additional meeting spaces.

"We were at risk to lose not only the Colts but NCAA Final Fours and several important conventions and exhibitions if we did not replace the RCA Dome," says John Klipsch, executive director of the Indiana Stadium and Convention Building Authority.

RCA was completed in 1983 but is considered small and without the amenities that fans desire.

It has the smallest seating capacity in the NFL (57,693) and ranks low in the number of corporate suites. They are major revenue generators for NFL teams, and the Colts' ownership made it clear that the team might consider moving if the revenue picture did not improve.

Construction Kickoff

Construction progressed impressively during the Colts season. At the time of the first kickoff this season in September, the project was seemingly a haphazard collection of concrete columns. By the time the team won the AFC Championship in late January, the massive structure was already partially clad in architectural precast and a steel roof frame was starting to emerge over the top.

Before excavation began in September 2005, the 38-acre site was primarily a parking lot, the site of pregame tailgating for the RCA Dome. Beyond digging up asphalt, site preparation also included demolishing a Comfort Inn constructed in the 1990s as well as a warehouse painted with a giant Colts horseshoe, says Scott Blanchard, contract manager for Hunt Construction Group, the contractor.

"We ran into some contaminated soil that had to be trucked to a controlled landfill," he says, adding that most of the soil on the site is suitable to remain and will be covered by parking lots by the time the project is complete.

The biggest issue posed by the site was a combined sewer line carrying away most of the downtown area's sewage and stormwater, says John Hutchings, principal of HKS. Fortunately, because of the way the stadium is oriented on the site, the sewer affected only one corner, and the decision was made to build around it.

Workers excavated down to the sewer line and built a transfer beam structure across the sewer system, Hutchings says. The presence of the sewer means elevators in one corner of the stadium won't reach the truncated lowest level, but otherwise the sewer line will not have a major impact.

The stadium is built on spread-footing foundations, "a massive pour," Hutchings says.

HKS' design places the field level 25 ft below grade, so it is not surprising that foundation work descended below the water table and necessitated dewatering. Pouring the large end footings required careful temperature monitoring to ensure minimal variance between interior and exterior temperatures and thus prevent micro-cracking, Blanchard says.

"The majority of the superstructure is cast-in-place concrete," he adds. The pour for each level is supported by two levels of bracing underneath.

"As we get farther up the building we're able to remove the bracing and people can get in and start building block walls and doing ductwork," Blanchard says.

A Million Blocks

When finished, the stadium will include a million square feet of poured decking, 600,000 sq ft of slab on grade and 1.1 million concrete blocks.

"The roof structure is 14,400 tons of steel, and we've just started putting some into place," Blanchard says.

The structure will support a sophisticated, retractable roof system (see sidebar), which is a key to making Lucas Oil Stadium a versatile event facility capable of allowing fresh-air football games as well as indoor uses such as basketball games, conventions and the national marching band championships held every fall in Indianapolis.

The basketball court will be set up in the center of the stadium floor, with seating added to courtside as it is now in the RCA Dome when it hosts Final Four events.

The difference is that Lucas Oil was designed to host basketball. It will offer good sight lines from both the upper and lower decks. Seating capacity for basketball will be about 70,000. Though normal football seating will be about 63,000, that, too, can be expanded.

The stadium will have a large number of retractable seating rows near the field-from 13 rows at the 50-yard line to as many as 18 in the north end zone.

Being able to move so many seats is crucial for permitting good visibility not just for football but for basketball, too.

Seating design at the end zone allows the stadium area to link up with exhibit hall space for more flexible convention options. The design even allows Lucas Oil to be configured for a Federation International Football Association-size soccer field, significantly wider than a football field.

"We have a lot of curtains added to the job in various configurations for multiple types of uses that will occur in the stadium," Hutchings says.
Construction has gone smoothly, Blanchard says.

"It's a fast-track process," he says, noting that architectural drawing has continued as construction has progressed, allowing some modifications along the way but causing no significant issues.

"Most of the budget has been pretty much on track," but there have been some surprises, he adds. Insurance costs were higher than anticipated, more contaminated soil had to be removed than expected and steel costs were $19 million above plan, due to market volatility as well as the sheer size of the project, Blanchard says.

SIDEBAR

Fresh-Air Football

Among the benefits football fans will gain when the Indianapolis Colts move into Lucas Oil Stadium is the option to let in fresh air when the weather is nice.

The stadium's design achieves this in some groundbreaking ways.

Most prominent is the retractable roof. Though a movable roof is not a new idea, the way it is achieved here is different, according to John Hutchings, principal with architect HKS Inc. of Dallas, the lead firm on the project.

"HKS came up with the concept of the roof panel stacking over other parts of the roof instead of moving over a parking lot at the end of the building," he says.

When it's time to open the roof, panels slide down the sloped, steel roofing structure, coming to a stop over the east and west stands and bathing the field in natural light. Closing the top means pulling the panels back up the incline.

"Because we designed this to have an NCAA center court Final Four basketball tournament, we put a lot of emphasis on creating a roof-cap system with redundant measures," Hutchings says. Clearly, roof integrity is important in any football stadium, but it's absolutely critical that the facility remain dry when housing basketball games, conventions and other strictly indoor events.

Breezes also can blow into Lucas Oil Stadium through the huge window above the north end zone.

"Lucas Oil Stadium will have the largest operable window in the world when it opens," Hutchings says. (The new Dallas Cowboys stadium, with its dual open end zones, will take over that distinction a year later.)

Open or closed, the window will allow nice views of the center of downtown Indianapolis.

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