Stanley Park stadium and Tom Hicks win praise

Bryan Trubey, the American architect who designed the new Dallas Cowboys stadium, has hailed the prospective new home of English Premier League club Liverpool as a triumph.

Trubey led his company HKS' design of a new stadium for the club, owned by American businessmen George Gillett and Tom Hicks. Hicks also owns the Texas Rangers Major League Baseball franchise and has worked extensively with HKS.

"We've worked with Tom for over ten years, so I have a relationship with him like I did with (Dallas Cowboys owners) the Jones family," said Trubey. "He's always been a visionary owner that's totally open to almost anything, and so it was the same kind of experience and you can see the same quality of design work is playing itself out."

In the case of Liverpool's new stadium, the construction of which is currently delayed by the club's failure to secure funding, that manifests itself in The Kop, a standalone behind-goal stand with 18,500 seats. The Kop at Liverpool's current stadium, Anfield, has carried the name since 1906, and is probably the most famous soccer stand in the world.

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"Creating a venue that's supportive of the team that's there but intimidating to those that visit it is one of the key elements of design," added Trubey. "You can see it a lot in the Liverpool design – as much as in anything we've done – the big design driver is The Kop. Man, what a spiritual experience the first time I went to a game there. That group of fans is over the top and unique in the world, and it was an instant inspiration to me to drive the whole design off of that. We obviously had to do a lot of things to be sensitive to the park and the community with exterior form too, and we've done that. But that powerful group of fans, that's probably the number one most phenomenal experience I've had in sport globally. I've been to a lot of places in the world, but that was easily the number one experience."

Within hours of leaving his first game at Anfield, Trubey had drawn up sketches including what he describes as a "monolithic structure, disproportionately large." The rest of the stadium, which will hold a total of 60,000 seated fans, is distinctive in itself, but Trubey makes no secret of the fact that he sees The Kop as unique.

"Some ideas happen over time, because they're more complicated, but some are like an epiphany and they seem so right that you'd almost have to ignore them not to listen to them," he said. "That whole thing is a good example of how a really good designer or architect can enhance an existing experience that’s evolved over a hundred years, take it into a new building and put it on steroids."

Despite the continuing delays, the design concept itself was, according to Trubey, a triumph for the company. "Although they're having a little bit of difficulty - like everybody is right now -  with financing, that was a hugely successful project for us. It's gotten a lot of critical and popular praise."

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