Dallas Cowboys Stadium is Here

The new Cowboys Stadium opens Saturday with George Strait instead of Tony Romo, a substitution that says a lot about sports architecture these days.

Ten years ago, pro football stadiums were still mainly for football. They hosted a dozen or so games, including playoffs, plus a scattering of high school contests, rock concerts and rallies for this and that. The rest of the year they were as empty as luxury condos in a recession.

Those days are over. The cost of new stadiums is soaring - the average is now roughly $600 million, and the Cowboys' $1.15 billion tab is the biggest in NFL history. And so is the pressure to fill every seat on every available date with something, anything: rock concerts, rodeos, revivals, demolition derbies.

Likewise, the demand for more bars, clubs, restaurants and so-called promotional spaces - Cowboys Stadium has 300,000 square feet of them, most in the NFL - means bigger concourses, bulkier buildings and potentially serious circulation problems.

"Our main competition is the home media center," Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said in unveiling the stadium design in 2006. "We wanted to offer a real experience that you can't have at home, but to see it with the technology that you do have at home."

The upper concourses, on the other hand, provide plenty of maneuvering room along with panoramic views of the sprawling suburban landscape. Those on the lower levels seem more cramped, like obstacle courses, especially around the VIP lounges, where millionaires shake hands with billionaires and Joe Fan has to detour around them to get where he wants to go.

There was also a petition by some fans to have the stadium named after longtime Cowboys coach Tom Landry. On May 13, 2009, Jerry Jones announced the official name; the Cowboys Stadium.

Measuring 160 feet wide and 72 feet tall (11,520 sq. feet), the high-definition television screen at Cowboys Stadium is the world's largest.