An artist rendering reveals how reconfigured seating could be a contiguous oval form and have a extra gradual slope.
(Rose Bowl Legacy Basis)
The Rose Bowl is a Nationwide Historic Landmark, and sustaining that standing is paramount to folks related to the stadium and Pasadena preservationists. Among the many signature components important to the design are the contiguous oval form and the gradual slope — also referred to as the rake — of the seating.
There’s logic behind the symmetry of the Rose Bowl. Organizers of the New 12 months’s Day sport needed to ensure there have been no dwelling and visiting groups. Everybody receives the identical remedy, has similar locker rooms, and so on. So preserving that contiguous form — versus, say, the asymmetry of SoFi Stadium or the Intuit Dome — took on a distinct significance.
Then there’s the low-slung look of the seating, in contrast to the vertical prominence of recent stadiums. There are not any obstructed-view seats within the Rose Bowl, and the suites and membership seats are the farthest from the sphere, within the Terry Donahue Pavilion.
Section 2 of the Lasting Legacy Marketing campaign consists of resizing and bettering the stadium seating, one thing that isn’t scheduled till 2029 at earliest. As an alternative of clawing into the present historic concrete, the plan requires placing a fabric on prime of that concrete, a protecting overlay, and constructing new seating on prime of that.
Spectators could have 4 to six inches extra legroom, and the sections will comprise about half as many seats from one aspect to the opposite.
“That will be a huge change,” stated Jens Weiden, Rose Bowl chief government. “Because some of our sections are 60 seats wide. If you sit in the middle, you have close to 30 people to your left and right that you have to pass over when you leave your seat. That’s saying, ‘Excuse me. Sorry. Excuse me,’ about 30 times.”
As an alternative of 77 rows from the underside to the bottom of the pavilion, the brand new design will characteristic about 50 rows. That may cut back the capability from about 90,000 to 70,000.
“Building stadiums that accommodate more than 70,000 people doesn’t happen anymore because when you get over 70,000, the experience just goes down for everybody,” Weiden stated. “It doesn’t just go down for that extra 20,000, it goes down for everybody because now you have to get that many people into parking lots, into restrooms on concourses, everything.”
The plan requires quite a lot of seat sorts, from molded plastic ones to thickly padded membership seats.
