Re: NDSU to the FBS
Originally Posted by
OrygunBison
Gondola seating won't work in the FFD unless you are looking at the game through the floor.
If you want to consider some other dumb ideas, perhaps we could just suspend a ginormous glass floor about 8 feet below the main roof trusses and sell spaces to lay down on the floor and watch the game looking down. Maybe instead of a glass floor, it is a floor with a bunch of setups similar to a massage table. You lay face down more comfortably and there's a small glass window at the head rest that gives you a perfect view of the entire field. An alternate would be some sort of zipline approach similarly providing views vertically straight down to the field.
The only way to ACTUALLY get significantly more seating into the dome would require the roof to be removed (and raised) and more rows added at the top....at least with view lines that work. The original design has the stadium seating very steep, eliminating much of an opportunity to add decks above, etc. The options to make significant changes in seating are limited. The only other thing that I could think of is changing to bench seating, which gets more people in a row. Right now, that would probably add 3,000-5,000 seats without doing anything else. People won't go for that, though.
If they remove the roof, they could get rid of the columns in the corner and get some more seating there as well, assuming that they increase the span...which would be likely. In theory, they could:
1. Between seasons, place 4 new columns some distance at a 45 degree angle out from where they are now, temporarily projecting them through the existing roof structure of the occupied facility. This would be much more difficult than it sounds.
2. Build a new outer shell of a new structure (including new roof with a larger span) without closing the existing dome. In order to keep the facility operational, they'd have to provide some ingress/egress tunnels from the existing building through the new construction zone that would be surrounding the structure. Assume at least 2 football seasons in this condition.
3. Between seasons, disassemble the old roof out of the inside as well as lots of other structural elements. Perhaps once this is done, you have one season of football with the current field and concrete seating area floating inside of the larger shell structure.
4. Between seasons, infill with new seating and concourses.
For this to work, they could do a lot of the work prefabricated so that it can be made during the season and installed in the off season.
FYI Iowa has bench seating. Up until about 3 years ago there were at least 2-3 people per row who couldnt get there seats if they got their too late because there wasnt any room. (One good reason to always get the preinstalled stadium chairs) Then they enlarged the seat space while they were doing other renovations and lost seating capacity.
Glad you posted as that gondola seating didnt look right.
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