Cite Sprint >^o
w a
Rodeo carnival. Astrodome, 1990. DIAMOND IN THE ROUND The Astrodome Turns 25
When its turnstiles opened "Not since the seven wonders of the world cal rallies, bullfights, basketball games being Texans, the problem was keeping il has man allowed his imagination lo soar. (though not bridge or chess matches). all from blowing away until they had it for business in the spring to conceive and lo construe) such won- and two feature-length movies - Robert all tacked down. They told everyone in der," trumpeted the official press pam- Altaian's Brewster McClnud (an Icarus- town to shul up for a day or two until this of 1965, the Astrodome phlet, which then went on to equate the under-glass fable) and The Bad News was accomplished." Astrodome with Ihe Tomb of Mausolus, Bears in Breaking Training (the world seemed like a shrine to all ihe Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Little League championship, with fences For a city seeking to plant itself in the Colossus of Rhodes. A commemorative pulled way in). And all of them taking national consciousness, nothing seems those Texas jokes founded booklet sold to the public on opening day place in a nearly perfect thermal environ- to work so well as acquiring a major- put it in the form of a more complicated ment In the spirit of the air-conditioning league sports team. A cily's participation on outrageous hyperbole metaphor, calling the Dome "the Taj mania of the sixties, when places were in professional sports portrays something Mahal of all stadia." Anxious letter writers being defined in terms of the amount of about the city as a social formation in and insufferable boasting. lo ihe local papers, inquiring how ihe chilled air pumped into them on a hot day. much ihe same way a picture postcard Dome fared when compared with, say, the the Astrodome was the biggest place in of the cily's monuments or most splendid Hearing its promoters tell it, Colosseum or Piazza San Pietro in Rome town. It also was a curiously appropriate views represents the city as a place. Re- (or some other large structure, past or symbol of ihe city of Houston and its ported on national television and radio the Dome was like nothing present, in another city), were reassured, location in the steamy, semilropical Gulf and covered on a daily basis in ihe news- usually by the use of ihe reader's example Coast. In the words of Jim Murray, a papers, a sports team - how it deports else on earth; to find suit- as a kind of measuring slick lo explain sports writer for the Los Angeles Times. itself, what it calls itself, where it plays just how much space would be lel'l over ihe Dome was a "moinimenl lo the its games, the peculiarities of its fans - able comparisons you had if il were placed inside the Dome. unlivcability of East Texas." But maybe presents a distil led picture of the city it Texas's climate wasn't an error in the represents to the world. In extreme to travel to the ancient Almost overnight, a barely imaginable Grand Scheme of Creation; it was just situations - consider Green Bay, Wiscon- part of the country took on recognizable a bigger challenge lo human ingenuity. sin - a sports team may be the only thing world, recalling the great form as (he Dome quickly became the most people associate with a city. nation's number three man-made tourist The Dome was like some chimerical (or most colossal) monu- attraction behind ihe Golden Gale Bridge island plopped down in a vast field on the It is probably one of ihe great American and Mount Ritshmore National Memorial, far south edge of the city, offering a tan- myths that there is anything even ap- ments from antiquity. according to a U.S. Department of Com- talizing glimpse of the brave new world proaching fealty between a sports learn merce poll of travel agents. And unlike Houstonians were creating for themselves. and ils city. But at some point in their some of its rivals - Walt Disney World Although a downtown site had been development, most cities seem to feel an (number six) and the Gateway Arch in investigated, il was bypassed in favor of acute need for professional sports and St. Louis (number seven) - the Dome the open prairie (leaving to New Orleans set out to do something aboul it. How else was a practical idea, loriy-cighl thousand the distinction of being Ihe first American to explain the way Jacksonville. Florida, people could sil inside on comfortable, ciiy to install such an extraierresirial collectively prostrated itself at ihe feet of theater-style seats to watch a baseball presence alongside downtown). In that Houston Oilers owner Bud Adams in a game. In a little less than three hours, first year, the most spirited contest enacted bidding war with the Houston Sports a simple realignment of the lower stands there was a war of lexical attrition Association, the prize being a perennially (which rotate 35 degrees on motorized between visiiing sports scribes from mediocre NFL franchise'.' But a city steel rails) could reset the stadium for around the country trying lo ouldo one seeking a franchise faces a chicken and- 53,000 football fans. There would also be another in lavishing figures of speech. egg dilemma: the baseball establishment rodeos, concerts, religious rallies (Billy There was also some journalistic debunk- says. "Gel a first-class stadium and we'll Graham's ten-day crusade in 1965 attrac- ing by out-of-town writers who'd had talk about a team"; the city says, "Give ted a flock of 380.194). demolition their fill of hearing about the Dome. Jim us a team and then we'll build a stadium." derbies, molocross events, tractor pulls. MurTay continued to be unimpressed, Take the case of St. Petersburg. Florida, soccer games, circuses, tennis matches even by the sheer engineering of the which is putting the finishing touches on (Billy Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs Dome: "Hoisting a roof is a theoretical a new, tilted-dome stadium wilh no tenant in "The Battle of the Sexes" in 1973). problem well within the reach of the but with which the city hopes to lure a Bruce C. Webb daredevil exhibitions, prizefights, politi- average Purdue sophomore. But Texans major-league basehall team down from 8 Cite Spring 1990
W TB
*»*• -ikWrsm-A •
»l ( I K BiMinllicijuc Vmnii.il. Puns Etienne-Louis Boullee, project for the Astrodome, 1960-65, general plan, Lloyd Houston Astros baseball club logo, Adie Paris Opera, 1 7 8 1 , perspective and and Morgan and Wilson, Morris, Crain, Marks, Gulf State Advertising, December general plan. and Anderson, architects. 1964.
the north; or San Antonio, which is strange to modem Houstonians, who seek 1965, llie\ were Healed m ,i whole new outside of consciousness, returning when, engaged in an equally speculative ma- to purify their city by building instead. scenario: the female ushers were now for example, the pall of cigarette smoke neuver involving the construction of a What the Houston Sports Association and "Spaceltes" and outfitted in gold lame that buill up inside before the city banned domed stadium on its east side, its visionary leader, former mayor and miniskirts and blue space boots. "Blast smoking would gather in the upper county judge Roy Hofheinz, had in mind Off Girls" worked the counter at the reaches, then slowly descend, creating at- Houston in the late 1950s was feeling was to build a sports stadium so novel and "Countdown Cafe." and the groundskeep- mospheric conditions like Pittsburgh in similarly deprived and in need of the re- so audacious it would make people forget ers, wearing specially designed astronaut the 1940s. Or when a well-hit high fly ball assuring presence of a professional there ever was an old Houston. (The old suits and bubble helmets, were called would direct the spectators' view upward baseball team. When the city made its Houston had partaken of baseball in Buf- "Earthmen." and set them to wondering if it would hit pilch to the National League's board of falo Stadium, a 12,0(X)-seat ouiposi of the lattice framework or that frightening directors in 196(1, a mode! of a proposed the St. Louis Cardinals on the east side of The landscape inside the Dome was a little bridge thai crawled along the inner covered stadium was brought along to town.) Hofheinz's sources were practical circus world, fusing elements of shop- surface of the Dome, connecting to the propitiate those skeptics who questioned ones: he formulated the idea for a covered ping-center kitsch with modern rational- gondola high above the ccnler of ihe field. the feasibility of playing in the mosquito- stadium from his experience trying to get ism. Around the playing field, tiers of infested heat and humidity of a rainy an enclosed shopping mall buill in 1959 seals in five vivid colors terraced up from It was also called to mind during that Gulf Coast summer. When the National on a site at Weslayan and Bissonnet, field level to upper deck under a lattice- agonizing first year when it became League awarded Houston one of two coupled with his recollections of a visit to and-Lucite sky. In the topmost reaches of apparent that putting the Dome up was expansion franchises for the 1962 season the Colosseum in Rome, which he later the stadium Hofheinz had his designers a simpler engineering feat than solving - the other going to the New York Metro- discovered had had ;i velarium, oi canopy, create a girdle of private Sky Boxes for some of the problems it created. The politans, who were to occupy the Polo that could be erected over the arena to the elite expense-account crowd. The Dome design settled on a lamella frame Grounds until Shea Stadium could be built shade and protect it from the elements. boxes were like private party rooms in a with diamond-shaped bracing, within -the Houston Sports Association devised A further catalytic ingredient was a series fantasy hotel, with a ball game going on which 4,596 Lucile skylights were insert- a $22 million, lax-supported bond issue, of fruitful meetings with R. Buckminster outside the window some ten stories ed lo admit the sunlight needed to nourish hastily erecting a temporary 33.000-seat Puller, the protean inventor of the geo- below. Each was equipped with bathroom, the grass on the field. The builders of the stadium next to a rapidly expanding hole desic dome. Hofheinz with his impossible bar, and television, furnished and deco- Dome might have done well to consult in the ground where the Domed Stadium dream and Fuller with his bag of impos- rated in a different motif, and given a thai 18lh-cenlury designer of hyperreali- would be built. The name settled on for sible solutions were probably made for name such as "Captain's Cabin," "Impe- lies, Etienne Boullee. rather than their the new franchise was the Colt .45s, and each other, according to Edgar Ray in his rial Orient," "Spanish Galleon." or engineering manuals. Boullee wrote: the team was framed in a Texas-style biography of Hofheinz, The Grand "Egyptian Autumn." Out in center field "When light enters a temple directly, art mixture of Wild West mythology and gun Huckster.* Fuller, who once asserted the was the famous scoreboard, a 60-by-3(X)- is pined against n a t u r e . . . . the ligln is fetishism. Parking-lot attendants at Coll cost effectiveness of covering a sizable fool mural of electronic pyrotechnics that reflected in those places where it falls Stadium, attired in orange ten-gallon hats, portion of New York City with one of his celebrated the home team's occasional directly and hurts ihe eyes."- The sky- hi lie neckerchiefs, and while overalls, domes, convinced Hofheinz that it was successes and rudely launted the opposi- lights in the Dome acted like lenses, directed cars into one of several parking possible to cover a space of any size and tion. Before a computerized Diamond- making the sunlight dazzle the ballplayers sections, each marked with a sign pro- control the climate inside, provided you vision scoreboard was installed in 19X3. when they were tracking down fly balls. claiming il "Wyatt Earp" or "Matt Dillon" didn't run out ol money. That was the kind the Astrodome scoreboard was surpris- Undaunted, Hofheinz had the skylights territory, or the domain of some other of challenge that appealed to Hofheinz. ingly low tech: like I he apparitions created painted out. Bui without sunlight, the legendary hero of the television Wild by the Wizard of Oz. many of the displays grass on the field died, a problem solved West, Ushers in modish cowgirl outfits were produced by a man silting inside During construction of the Dome, first by painiing the brown slubble green. were called "Triggerettes." and there was the scoreboard, back-projecting slides Houston was also refashioning its image Then they discovered Astroiurf. a "Six Shooters Club" for kids. The "Fast (or silhouettes of his own clapping hands | from "Bayou City" to "Space City," draw- Draw Club." a bar designed to look like onto a perforated screen to create the ing on the recent relocation of the NASA God only knows what the Monsanto the Long Branch Saloon of the "Gun- illusion that they were produced by exotic Manned Spacecraft Center to nearby Clear Chemical Company was doing when il smoke" series, was a members-only club electronic technology. But the effect was Lake City and the city's association with concocted this plastic grass - the tactile for adults, since Houston's laws at the like combining real, live baseball with the Great Society adventure in outer space equivalent of scratch-and-sniff food books time forbade serving liquor by the drink the responsive persona of an electronic (even the police department had adopted or freeze-dried ice cream. Coming like except in clubs. pinball machine: an Astros homer would an orbiting cosmos for its uniform patch, carpet in 15-foot rolls that zipped together set off a chain reaction of lighted displays and the local counterculture newspaper to cover the ground, it looked from a that included charging bulls, fireworks Set against the relatively serene character appeared under a Spare City masthead), distance like a too-perfect, retouched fash- over a lighted Dome, a gun-toting of baseball's traditional venues, all this Hofheinz. not to be included out. de- ion photograph. Up close it had all the cowboy, and a waving Lone Star flag. manufactured hoopla captured national cided to capitalize on this new image by pastoral charm of a green Brillo pad - or attention. But il wasn't ultimately the kind changing the name of Houslon's team "concrete with fringe," as il became of image you wanted to have working to the Astros. The stadium, still officially There was usually so much going on in known lo the National Football League for you when you were trying to build the the Harris County Domed Stadium, the vast space that it was easy to forget players who pitted flesh and bone against 21st-century city ahead of schedule. became known as the Astrodome. (In dis- about the Dome itself. Being in the Dome its unyielding, prickly surfaces. Carpeting carding the old Coll .45 appellation, the was a condition sensed first by the skin, the Astrodome completed Ihe work of In the days before cities could set public Houston Sports Association also rid itself the thermal delight of leaving an over- creating the artificial world. Soon the stuff relations firms to work on their image of a sticky problem with the Colt Firearms heated day for the near-perfect conditions was as ubiquitous as kudzu. and every problems, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that Company over royalties from profits made inside: 74 degrees, with a slight breeze ballpark looked like a billiard table. "all towns should be made capable of pu- on the novelties sold at the stadium that blowing out of the air-conditioning ducts. used the name.) When fans arrived at the rification by fire or decay within each half The sensation that you were actually Baseball has always lacked the neo- Domed Stadium for opening day in April century." It's an idea that would appear inside was momentary: then it slipped just gladiatorial festivity of football, with its
Interior, Astrodome during construction, April 1964.
GxBHn '•' IIK- Illusion Sport* A.vMxiulk>n Cite Spring 1990 9
May 1963. July 1 9 6 3 . August 1 9 6 3 . September 1 9 6 3 .
-— ! . j v - ,( i H / jfv^: HMD MHWPW^V 1 DOMED t -:UM |
CtWlHQ ill lilt- I Illusion Spirts AjUdttfaSfl HL-.II'!. HmnliM Ground blazing, 3 January 1962. Roy Hofheinz appears in second row, with hat and Vision-obstructed seats with compensatory monitor. glasses; R. E. "Bob" Smith is at right, in light suit.
nearly nonstop action and a supporting its own circumstantial and nearly always closest to the final iteration of the sta- Galleria. the Dome's street version, cold cast of cheerleaders, marching bands, and asymmetrical configuration. Unlike dium, which may well be the non-place air could still be blown around, as it was precision clone-ette drill teams to till in football, which is played on a field of realm ol the iele\ ision studio. ( I n m k . i l h . on the tines of people waiting to get on the the empty spots. For all the historical prescribed dimensions, baseball is played Channel 13*S studios are housed in a rides at the Astro World amusement park appeal and strategic maneuverings of the on a field with a strictly regulated infield pint-sized version of the Astrodome.) next door. game, baseball is a comparatively austere and an outfield of no fixed dimensions. spectator sport, riddled with in-between Of the baseball parks built between 1909 Bui if the symmetrical, multipurpose, Roland Barthes in his essay on the Eiffel time, pauses, and endless waiting tor and 1923, only one was perfectly sym- lookalike sladium-in-the-round has Tower claims the lower to be the absolute something to happen. While a football metrical, and no two were alike.' Students become the rule in the latter part of the embodiment of a monument. "In order to team is always playing against both the of the game have always been attentive 20th century, the Dome was still at one satisfy the oneiric function by which it other team and the clock, baseball creates to the subtleties of selecting a lineup and point a true and authentic symbol of becomes a monument." Barthes writes, its own time existentially, precisely the strategies for playing each field. Selling Houston, portraying in its form and "the lower has to escape reason. . . . |lt] kind of game to exist in the temporal the Astrodome in the center of a wide- enterprise three of the things for which must become totally and utterly useless.'M limbo of the Dome. To bring it into the open prairie allowed the designers to Houston was becoming known: audacity By Barthes's definition the Dome fails television-shortened attention spans of the realize a Platonically multipurpose stadi- and entrcprencurship. a suburban con- entirely to become a monument: its entire 1960s and to attract a following for the um. But in catering to several tenants, its cept of space, and air conditioning. The raison d'etre is to be far something. But new and painfully marginal franchise, economies of shape yielded a universal entrepreneurship was purely a matter of one might claim for it a special case of Hofheinz reconstituted the stadium as a configuration expressive of neither the private and individual, rather than civic, momentary monumentality. fulfilling the kind of theme park, with the hall game as genius loci nor the genius baseball. Today will, reinforcing the belief that a good obligations of irrationality and useless- simply one of its attractions. nearly every stadium subscribes to more businessman was worth a hundred city ness for a short time before the original, or less the same doughnut configuration, politicians when it came to getting practical claims of its makers appear But like a fairground after the carnival has creating a situation about which baseball something done. The sense of space was fulfilled and the sense of the monumental gone, the Dome today has lost some of player Richie Hebner confessed: "When not the Renaissance idea of space, passes over to a sense of normality. One the color of the early years, the victim of I stand at home plate in Philadelphia. I considered architecturally integral with no longer sees it as extraordinary. One of changing attitudes and economic pres- don't honestly know if I'm in Pittsburgh, buildings. Rather it was space in the the more distressing features of life in the sures. An expansion in 19X7 increased the Cincinnati, St. Louis, or Philly. They all exploded, suburban sense of separating latter part of the 20th century is a pen- capacity of the stadium by 10,000 seats look alike." For spectators the multipur- things from one another. Beginning on the chant for disguising extraordinary realities as a concession to the Houston Oilers pose ring stadium involves compromises outside, the Dome sits like a giant oil by investing them with fictional contents, football team, then threatening to move to thai reduce the immediacy of experience storage tank, estranged from whatever leading to the conclusion that most of life a more capacious stadium with greater found in single-purpose stadiums, baseball context it might have had by acres of is a sham. In the case of the Dome, the revenue-producing potential in Jackson- as well as football. concentric parking lanes, and tenuously inelegance of its "architecture" leads one ville. The new seats perfected the arena linked with the various satellite enter- to conclude that its designers must have prises of its domain: exhibit halls, considered it to be nearly invisible, or at configuration by tilling in the 300-foot Television has shifted the emphasis of amusement park, hotel. Unlike Boutlee's best merely a circumstance judged solely gap formerly occupied by the electronic spectator sports from stadium crowds to schematic design of 1781 for an ideal on the basis of what it did rather than what scoreboard and television screen in center a vicarious, electronically fed audience. opera house surrounded by a circle of it looked like. But for a short time there is field preempting the cyclopean eye iluii Baseball, with its natural intervals, fits heroically scaled columns holding up an an overwhelming feeling of the sheer had invested the green-carpeted Dome neatly into the commercial scheduling exterior ambulatory, the Dome on the extravagance of effort it lakes to make a with the ambience of an enormous living pattern. Tim football has had to invent outside is pure marketplace technology, place that somehow dwarfs the sense of room. Promises of a new, more spectacu- artificial gaps - the two-tninute warning, presenting the blind face of a shopping its contents. It appears as a pure phenome- lar, higher-tech replacement, which commercial time-outs - that interrupt the center punctuated by giant mechanical air non, As David Brinkley ventured on included hints of laser displays designed natural flow of the game and can only be chillers and diminutive entrance pavilions. the evening news when the Dome first by film impresario George Lucas, have so understood in terms of the way television In a reversal of Leo Marx's "machine in opened, "Baseball here is almost inciden- far proved unfulfilled. measures time. Spectators often find the garden" characterization of early-20th- tal." You can still recover the feeling from themselves missing more by seeing the century domestic architecture, the Dome time to lime, especially if you go out there History will probably remember the Dome game live than by watching it on televi- reserves its paradisiacal pleasures for the when there's nothing going on and sit for another, more insidious achievement: sion, particularly with the advent of inside, using its engineered container to in one of the seats, contemplating the vast, it is a kind of idealized typological harbin- multiple camera angles, instant replays, create not architectural space but its perfect emptiness. When the architectural ger of the modern, multipurpose stadium, and interpretive commentaries: hence suburban equivalent: air. history class at the University of Houston roofed or not. It represented a milestone the odd sight of fans lugging portable created a series of full-size drawings of not only in the denaturing of two national television sets into the stadium. Presently a number of classical buildings, the Dome sports (to say nothing of the rodeo), but more than 500 television monitors are It was the air conditioning that had every- was the obvious - perhaps the only - also in the standardization of sports permanently mounted throughout the one talking - 6,600 tons of it. It was a place in the city in which to hang them, stadiums and a purification of the idiosyn- Astrodome, some of them installed to part of that magnificent Houston vision thus bringing into the Dome the "architec- crasies that had distinguished one baseball compensate for impaired sightlines. Tele- before the energy crises, when it seemed ture" it otherwise lacks. park from another. Traditional baseball vision's domination has made the game that the whole city, or at least as much of parks were formed by shoehoming the into ;i media event staged for the home the city as anyone cared about, would be \ iewcr. and Nielsen ratings count for more field and stands into a preexisting urban set under glass and air-conditioned. Even If the monumental work is able to tran- than the gate. Perhaps the Astrodome is context, with the result that each had when the place wasn't closed in like the scend its function, it also invites specula- HI Cite Spring 1990
high flies, but ihe reduced solar levels were not enough to keep the grass healthy. Once Shaggy Rug Story again the answer was paint - this time green pigment sprayed on the brown sod. lion aboul what else it might have been. The Greening of When il was clear that the grass was dying, While the Dome was still being designed. the Astros were prepared to play their Hofheinz nil on the idea of making the the Astrodome second season, like the mosi deprived of place double as the world's largesi fall- sandlotters. on an all-dirt field. out shelter - perhaps fulfilling one of Barthe.s's criteria through a uselessness of Before this unappealing action was taken, intentions. Hofbeinz's motives were more however. Judge Hofheinz heard of an a matter of opportunism than anylhing Certainly no one could accuse the experimental synthetic "grass" that might else, an attempt to gather eight million Astrodome's sponsors and designers of be used as a carpet for his now-shabby federal dollars into his project through the thinking small. They knew lhai building palace floor. The Monsanto Chemical even-then-vestigial Civil Defense pro- ihe world's first indoor stadium large Company installed roughly 100,000 square gram. The idea prompted the digging of enough for baseball and football was a feet of ils evergreen flooring and named il an oversized basement level before it was venture that, if successful, would make ils in the Dome's honor. Thus was Asiroiurl quashed, apparently by functionaries in mark on both sports. Yet I wonder if even baptised under crisis conditions. Being the Kennedy administration seeking to put the most self-confidenl of these people synthetic, il could noi die: being integrally I.BJ in his place.1 Judge Hofheinz, who (the leading candidate for lhal honor colored, it slaved green. It needed no water, built a Ittuin apartment fur himsell that being Judge Roy Hofheinz himself) ever and since it did not engage in transpiration, included a barber and beauty shop, a dreamed that this it reduced the dehumidification demands medieval chapel, and a circus room be- structure would on the air-conditioning system. hind the right-field wall, prompted become ihe most University of Houston student David influential stadium Il would be nice to say that this miracle Bucek to create a design thai relined the of its century, and material ended the woes of indoor base- Dome as a mixed-use development for perhaps even of all ball in Houston, but it merely substiiuled allergy sufferers, answering the question time. The simple fact new ones and eventually spread them of what to do with the Dome when the is that the Astrodome throughout much of the sporting universe. fans slop coming to watch another season Itered the way Sladiums that did not otherwise need il of the local also-rans. America's most pop- installed Astroturf or 3M's Tartan Turf to ular outdoor sports simplify maintenance or to promote the would be played; it faster game that the speedy surface The Dome presented itself on opening %£f- did so dramatically, allowed. When used outdoors, it proved a day in 1965 as an object of self-induced perhaps irrevocably, fine solar heating device, producing field adoration, manifolded through expansive and entirely through temperatures as high as [30 degrees. figures of speech. Twenty-five years have miscalculation. Because it was not as resilient as grass, it made it a more comfortable object. Per- increased player fatigue and wear on leg haps still a renegade building, it none- joints. Because il did noi give way like theless fits comfortably into ihe Houston The Astrodome's grass, it increased the frequency and scheme. Coming as close to being a main significance lies severity of knee injuries associated with symbolic, public place as Houston can not in ils volume, twisting and sudden slops. And, of course, manage, il draws the transportable center span, air-condilion- there was a major element of aesthetic of the city southward. ng prowess, or immense skylight. offensiveness to fans and players brought up on the real thing. Outfielder Dick Whether it's ihe Oilers or ihe Astros, but in ils plastic floor covering. Astroturf is Allen summed up all these objections by the rodeo or Ihe Rolling Stones, they're declaring, "If a horse won't eat il. 1 don't playing in the big urban room. Or the ihe end result of a i i,i succession of archi- want to play on it." Alas, such sentiments Guru Maharaj Ji. who once played the Sweeping changes at the last have carried little weight with decision Dome and tried to raise its roof with moment, 18 April 1 9 6 6 . tecturally created problems, and is ilself an expedient rather than a true solution. makers in sports, and artificial turf has collective meditation, without result. He become entrenched. The new Toronto pul it in a more spiritual metaphor: "The The Dome was meani to he a great conser- vatory, with several acres of God's green Skydome, for example, has an openable Astrodome is like God. You have to roof thai would allow real grass to grow, experience them both first hand.'i grass growing under its clear Lucite roof. Its hothouse (or more accurately, cool- but il uses plastic nonetheless. Null--. house) ecology was diligently calculated, and, since the Dome's Tifway 419 Beyond Astroturf, ihe Dome's design had I I-.II:.MI W. Ray. The Gra/ul Huckster (Memphis: Bermuda grass was bred at Texas A&M Memphis Slate University Press, 19X0). Ray's h