JobSight: Target Field, Minneapolis
Since moving from Washington in 1961, the baseball team always shared stadium space in the Twin Cities, with a few banners and a painted logo on the turf as the best indicators of a home field.
It’s not surprising that, even before the team finally secured funding in 2006 to build a new baseball-only stadium, team officials had two goals in mind with their new park. They wanted a look that indicated permanence, and said Minnesota.
They got both by incorporating 100,000 ft² of Minnesota limestone into the new Target Field, which opened for play this April.
ROCK SOLID
For Kevin Smith, Twins executive director of public affairs, Target Field is first and foremost about stability.
“For years, we were all about banners – plastic banners,” he says. “Our banners would go up, and then one of the other teams would play and our banners would come down.”
Starting with the 1961 move, the Twins shared space with the Minnesota Vikings football squad, first at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minn. (now the site of the Mall of America). the University of Minnesota became a stadium-mate when the two professional sports teams moved into the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis in 1982.
Perpetual complaints about the ceiling and artificial turf in the Metrodome had the Pohlad family, which owns the Twins, thinking about building a new baseball park as early as the mid-1990s.
Even in those early days, Smith says the Pohlads were focused on a few key requirements.
“They wanted something that was Minnesotan,” says Smith. “They also didn’t want a cookie-cutter, generic-type ballpark here in downtown Minneapolis.”
Although the search for taxpayer funds to help pay for the new facility threatened for a time to move the team across the Mississippi River to St. Paul, Smith says the Pohlads were always mindful of the need for their stadium to be a comfortable architectural fit with its surroundings.