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A New Standard for
Stadium Design

Minute Maid Park
Houston, Texas

Our retractable roof design for Minute Maid Park established a worldwide standard for economy, trouble-free operations and delivery schedule. Our traffic and civil services also contributed to the $250-million home of the Houston Astros being completed on time and on-budget on a redeveloped site in downtown Houston.

Minute Maid’s 580-foot span retractable roof allows the Astros to play on grass in open air, while protecting up to 42,000 fans from rain, heat and humidity during the dog-days of summer.

We collaborated with the architect, mechanization consultant and wind tunnel consultants to develop an elegant 9,000-ton roof system featuring truss panels that curve to emulate the flight of a batted baseball. A 115-foot-tall movable glass wall in left field—the first of its kind—rides along with the roof to open in 12 minutes, to provide dynamic views of Houston’s skyline.

We performed traffic impact studies on the major streets and freeway system surrounding the site, prepared civil site plan drawings for the stadium area and parking lot blocks and coordinated utility and platting issues with the City of Houston.