STADIUM

By the fall of 1971 it had become obvious that the old stadium could no longer meet the needs of the football crowds wanting to attend the games. The problems were summarized by President Parks in an address to the Faculty Council on January 11, 1972:

Our present stadium not only is small, but, unfortunately, it has even more critical deficiencies. The fact is that it is an old stadium, it has serious structural problems, and it lacks adequate ancillary facilities, such as rest rooms, to handle the size of crowds that are attracted to the games. More importantly, the stadium is in a serious state of disrepair that will require an investment of 1 to 1 ½ million dollars over the next 10 years to keep it minimally operable. If this investment is made, what will you have? Obviously, something less than optimum for parking and seating. No convenient place for adequate parking could be made available. One third of the seats (10,000) are in the end zone, and there are only 5,900 seats in the west stands… We do not think it is good economics to continue, over the years, to send large amounts of good money after bad in an attempt to make the present stadium into an adequate one for the future.

At a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Iowa State University Foundation on March 11, 1972, President Parks made a similar presentation, and that Committee approved the retention of “an experienced stadium consultant”. The New York firm of Praeger, Kavanaugh and Waterbury was called on to make a preliminary design, which was presented to the Foundation and the University in June. However, that design was too costly and did not meet other requirements of the program.

In 1973 it was decided to proceed on a new concept: proposals were asked for on the basis of a total firm cost for design and construction of the project. It was believed that this procedure would save both time and money.

Proposals were received on September 20, 1973, from six different design-build firms. Each presented either a perspective or a model of the proposed stadium and the firm cost proposal. All schemes were reviewed carefully and the one presented by Architects Finch-Heery and Durrant, Deininger, Dormner, Kramer, Gordon with contractor Huber Hunt & Nichols was selected as the most visually appealing as well as at the lowest cost for construction.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held on October 26 and the project was then underway. It was completed in time for the game against the Air Force Academy on September 20, 1975.

The 42,500 seating capacity of the main structure was increased to 48,000 in 1976 by the addition of end-zone bleachers.