Princeton: One Ugly Stadium

by Jeffrey Hart

Bruce Wood covers football for the Valley News superbly, and I read his articles avidly. He gets it right all the time and has realistic quotes from players and coaches. However, I must (mildly) dissent from his awe-struck account of the new Princeton stadium, which I visited for this year's Dartmouth-Princeton game.

I don't think the new stadium is architecturally successful or sends the right message. The former Palmer Stadium at Princeton, which apparently could not have been salvaged (pieces of concrete were dropping off), sent a stern architectural message: “Football is played here. In particular, Princeton football, serious football.”

This is by no means the message of the new construction. Its message is: Football is entertainment. Even Princeton football. Maybe especially Princeton football.” The Princeton faculty members I was with emphatically agreed with my estimate of it.

Probably the most egregious insult to Princeton and Ivy League football in the new stadium is the presence around the north rim of the stands of - if you can believe it - a string of luxury glassed-in boxes, still unfinished. I suppose the big spenders can sit in the boxes and watch the game on TV, just like in pro football. The more you think about it, the more astonishing this ridiculous idea is. These boxes are only part of the essentially jokey pseudo-professional message that pervades the entire conception. Even worse is hyper-electric scoreboard, which is full of commercial messages, just like the Dallas Cowboys scoreboard, I suppose. This is so phony. Princeton University does not need electronic ads, or the ads over the PA system that are served with the (incompetent) game commentary.

There is much more to say about the ghastly scoreboard and its messages, but let us move on.

The exterior of the new stadium is a light grey smooth material — certainly not brick, maybe some sort of smooth grey stone, but maybe a chemical product, and such as might be appropriate for a restroom interior. It embarrassingly lacks gravitas, seriousness, and was very likely meant to. It lacks even more — a sense of time, such as bricks and concrete possess. The architectural materials chosen are, designedly, anti-historical.

A certain spirit of “feminization” underlies the whole concept of the new stadium, including the boxed greenery of various sorts outside. Is this a flower show? Is Brad Pitt playing ball here? Leonardo diCaprio? The only noticeable vegetation one wants around a football stadium is Ivy growing on its walls.

There are all sorts of astonishing features about this new Princeton creation, but one of the most amazing occurs at the east end, which used to be the open end of the Palmer Stadium horseshoe. Two years ago, in the last game played before the demolition of Palmer Stadium, a Dartmouth receiver received the opening Princeton kickoff and headed for the open end of that horseshoe. If he had not made a radical cut and fallen, he might still be at the New Jersey shore. Now we see a visual apparition there, a large triple-scalloped white canopy, apparently made of some kind of synthetic material. It functions as a roof for the stands that overlook track and field events. This so-called “space age” design is “postmodern” and phony, Disneyworld-inspired. It is hard to think of an architectural gesture that could be more silly, except perhaps a giant ice cream cone. Did the Bob Venturi firm have a hand in this?

Functionally, the double-shell design of the stadium does not work. When you pass through those pastel, non-committal, feminized, greyish ersatz walls, you enter a passageway between outer and inner shells. The stairs to the seats begin at the inner shell. The passageway is an icy wind tunnel. To buy a hot dog, you're Admiral Byrd. Someone should have thought of wind baffles. Or thought of something.

It is possible, as our very fine coach John Lyons fears, that high school seniors, being young and foolish, will be impressed by the pseudo-professional footballism football and jokey modernism of the new Princeton stadium. They may dream that within its expensive unseriousness they will be playing for the Jets or the 49ers, while all the time the new stadium is telling everyone else that they are, at most, entertainers, and perhaps fools. This is not what Princeton University should tell its student-athletes. Dick Kazmaier and Brad Glass were neither entertainers nor fools.

Serious Ivy League fans do not sit in luxury boxes. Serious Ivy League fans dress for the weather.

As compared to the Yale Bowl, or Harvard's Soldier's Field, or Dartmouth's Memorial Field, the new Princeton stadium is fluff. It entirely lacks gravitas, authority. I suspect that unconsciously, or perhaps consciously, it was intended to denigrate serious football.

But football is not entertainment. As the great Vince Lombardi said, “Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport.”

Let Dartmouth people not be too much in awe of this strange architectural and cultural event. It is very much a thing of its moment, and not a very good moment at that. It may prolong that moment forever.

By the way, even at $5 per ticket, the new Princeton stadium was half-full on this year's final weekend. In 1965, with Dartmouth's Lambert Trophy team playing Princeton in a final game, Palmer Stadium was sold out, and Princeton undergraduates were selling their tickets for $150.

You don't need postmodern fluff and jokeyness when the teams are playing real football. I doubt that the new Princeton stadium will send the right message to anyone who wants to.