Gehry Glitter

One morning in May, at the monthly board meeting of the Economic Development Corporation, Kansas City, Missouri, Mayor Kay Barnes hit the highlights of her plan to build a downtown arena. The mayor wanted new taxes on hotel stays and car rentals to cover about half of the cost, which would be $225 million to $250 million.

Funded by the city, the Economic Development Corporation is more or less an auxiliary mayor's office. Predictably, Barnes' brief presentation was met with applause.

The cheering had barely subsided, though, when board member Beth Derrough piped up with a comment. The city, Derrough said, should hire homegrown architects.

A few weeks earlier, four Kansas City-based sports-architecture firms had announced their intention to collaborate on the design of the arena. The consortium -- HOK, Ellerbe Becket, CDFM2 and Heinlein Schrock Stearns -- boasts a wealth of experience. Members of the Downtown Arena Design Team, as they want to be known, have built 25 of the 28 latest arenas to house National Basketball Association and National Hockey League teams.

By pledging to work together, team members hope to make it impossible for the city to reject four local employers in favor of another architect.

Even one with Frank Gehry's reputation.

Gehry is famed for designing the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. He's a brand name, like Frank Lloyd Wright.

And he wants to do Kansas City's arena.

Gehry is trying to land the job with the help of Crawford Architects, a firm with offices in Sydney, Australia, and midtown Kansas City. David Murphy and Tom Proebstle, principals at the firm, have impressive résumés of their own. They played leading roles in the renovation of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the design of the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

"We have sports expertise," Proebstle says. "Frank is a visionary." But Gehry's worldwide recognition may not be enough to sway the city to try something out of the ordinary.

If arena proponents can overcome opposition from rental-car companies, City Councilwoman Saundra McFadden-Weaver and others who are urging voters to turn down the financing scheme on August 3, will Kansas City end up with a less-than-stellar facility out of a sense of obligation to, as Derrough urged, hire the local team?

Proebstle says the Downtown Area Design Team has been "laying on the grease" to make its selection seem inevitable. The team has hired a public-relations firm and offered to draft a rough arena design so voters can carry a mental image to the polls. "They're trying to get out ahead in terms of these so-called good ideas," he says. "There's nothing new in what they're saying. They've done it in every other city."

The Crawford guys fashion themselves the Apple to the Downtown Area Design Team's Microsoft. They suggest that HOK and Ellerbe Becket, the largest sports-architecture firms in the world, have become plodding bureaucracies, churning out unoriginal designs.

"You have all this talent, but it's gotten stagnant," Murphy says. He and Proebstle worked at Ellerbe Becket before leaving for Crawford in 2001.

Murphy is not the first to suggest that the leading sports-architecture firms may have hit a creative wall. Elements of the retro baseball stadium -- brick facings, painted steel, asymmetrical outfields -- are fast becoming clichés. "Who knows? Maybe these will be the cookie-cutter stadiums of their day," Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt said to the Associated Press after the HOK-designed Citizens Bank Park opened this spring in Philadelphia.

Neil deMause, a co-author of the book Field of Schemes, which casts a critical eye at public subsidies for sports stadiums, says the new ballparks are becoming harder to distinguish. "The only way to tell what city you're in these days is to check which ex-ballplayer is running the barbecue stand," he tells the Pitch.

And even though HOK is still capable of terrific designs -- PNC Park in Pittsburgh and SBC Park in San Francisco are considered gems -- its buildings do not make dramatic statements the way Frank Gehry's do. The curving glass, titanium and limestone of the Guggenheim in Bilbao turned a derelict port city into a tourist destination.

"Kansas City deserves a Frank Gehry," Proebstle says.

To blunt Gehry's appeal, the design team is selling trust. "We have never missed a deadline," says Stuart Smith, an Ellerbe Becket spokesman, speaking for the team. "We've brought all of them in on time and on budget."

The design team is also dropping hints that star architects court danger. "A building that looks beautiful in postcards but goes bankrupt in practice ruins our collective reputation," Brad Schrock, a principal at Heinlein Schrock Stearns, warned in a press release.

The competition for the design of the downtown arena is unlike any other. A major sports facility has not been built in Kansas City in more than 30 years. The Sprint Center, as the new arena would be called, presents a unique opportunity for hundreds of sports architects employed at various firms.

"So many of the designers in this town do their work by getting on airplanes and flying to faraway locations, either other spots in this country or overseas," Smith says. "How exciting would it be to be able to work on a project in your own backyard, to be able to take your spouse or your neighbor or your child down and actually touch a building that you worked on?"