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You don’t have to be a baseball fan or an architecture critic to compare the Oakland Athletics’ new stadium in Las Vegas.
The 33,000-seat stadium designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and HNTB has recently caused a stir on the internet and social media, with commentators deriding its unconventional shape, which Bjarke Ingels called a “spherical armadillo” . Others, meanwhile, say the proposed stadium is a coy replica of the Sydney Opera House, which makes sense in a city filled with replicas of New York and Paris landmarks and Venetian canals.
Jokes aside, the new renderings mark a major step in Cal Baseball’s long-teased move to Las Vegas. Over the years, the A’s have been looking for new territory.
The idea of evacuating the Oakland Coliseum was first floated in 2006. The idea gained renewed attention in 2018 with the release of a BIG-designed master plan for a mixed-use development centered around a new stadium in California. A revised plan was released in 2019. In November, the team announced plans to leave Oakland for the Las Vegas Strip, having previously offered visuals of its Las Vegas home venue.
This latest design offers a lot for a relatively small website. Tropicana Resort currently occupies 35 acres, while this project occupies only 9 acres. In the renderings, the domed sports complex is surrounded by an outdoor plaza with pedestrian connections to the street. It will face the world’s largest cable-net glass wall, making the site fully visible from the outside. The roof is arguably the stadium’s most visible and controversial design element: it will be made up of five oversized curved metal panels that the architect describes as “resembling a baseball pennant.” Although decorative, they are shaped to minimize sunlight exposure.
“Our design for the Athletics’ new home in Vegas was designed to respond to the city’s unique culture and climate. Five pennant-shaped arches surround the stadium,” BIG founder and creative director Bjarke Ingels said in a statement. , both shading the Nevada sun and facing the softer daylight of the north. “The resulting architecture is like a spherical armadillo—shaped by the local climate—while opening up and inviting the life of the Las Vegas Strip.” Enter and explore. In the City of Wonders, A’s ‘Armadillo’ is designed for passive shading and natural light—an architectural response to Nevada’s climate that generates a new indigenous icon in Las Vegas.”
Notably, the stadium does not have a retractable roof, something new stadiums in warmer (and cooler) climates have considered and added in recent renovations. John Fisher, owner of A. in las vegas review magazine Due to the hot weather, the team and designers chose to forego the removable roof.
“One of the conclusions we came to after looking at a lot of other stadiums in warm weather areas was that the roof doesn’t open as much as you might think,” he said. “So we decided that the most important thing here was the design. A great building that feels like being outside but most importantly comfortable every day of the year.”
In-cabin comfort will be controlled through air conditioning that blows air from seat level rather than above.
The 33,000 seats will be arranged in a bowl shape with separate upper and lower decks. The architects said this would bring fans closer to the pitch and “provide clear sight lines to every seat”. Internally, large exhibition spaces will allow the stadium to not only accommodate matchday catering essentials, but also double as a venue for concerts and conferences. An 18,000-square-foot giant screen will be installed in the stadium – the largest in Major League Baseball.
Bally’s, which owns the Tropicana site where the stadium is located, is working with Gaming & Leisure Properties (GLPI) on a larger development plan for the area that will add towers and resort facilities, which, according to A, “will be implemented in the future. A few months.”
In addition, plans to connect the stadium to regional transport council services are still ongoing. The facility is planned to support up to 2,500 on-site parking spaces, but the team hopes to connect the stadium to the local transportation network via express buses, similar to T-Mobile Stadium and Allegiant Stadium.
The Athletics hope to throw out the first pitch in their new Las Vegas home in the spring of 2028.
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