New Sugar Land Minor League Stadium Easily Assembled from Standardized Suburban Parts

Building a baseball stadium can be a complicated job. But the latest drawings released by PGAL, the architecture firm that’s been doing design work for Sugar Land’s new minor league ballpark, make it look like the project’s designers are doing their best to break down the process into some easily understood components, which should make the task simpler to comprehend for whichever design-build contractor is selected. Can you build some bleachers? Great! How about a brickface strip center, or maybe one of those drive-up apartment complexes? Knew you could! Now just wrap it around the outside from 1st to 3rd base, and you’ve pretty much got it.

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Opening day for the Lizard Kings, King Canes, or Skeeters across Route 90 from the Walmart Super Center at Highway 6: April 2012.

Renderings: PGAL

21 Comment

  • Maybe this is a new suburban form of mixed use development. Who says you can’t pick up your prescriptions, grab a venti latte and watch a ball game all at the same place?

  • This was supposed to be “Option #4” for the Dunlavy HEB. I assume this will also have a bank, dry cleaners, and a nail salon/ waxing emporeum?

  • Don’t forget to surround the whole thing with a mall-style parking lot.

    Wilf, why stop at just one bank? Surely multiple banks would be better, preferably all with separate drive-throughs.

  • Sugar Land isn’t exactly known for cutting edge architecture (even in Fort Bend County), so why did we anticipate something better?

  • Turrets and Stucco and Paladium Windows, Oh My! … Kinda looks like the Boy Scout building on TC Jester,

  • Turrets? I don’t see turrets. I see some hipped roofs but no turrets.

  • You’re right, Sid. There is obviously room for a bank on every corner of this place and, no doubt, will end up with 3-4 stand alone banks. If the actual ballpark resembles these drawings, I hope they get a sponsorship deal from Holiday Inn Express.

  • Turrets? that is what I have, #/*X+ you ^*%?##. Q&4D?%^^

  • I was trying to think of a baseball metaphor to use here, but this design is so bland that all I really want to do is doze off.

  • How’s this for a baseball metaphor:

    That design has all the sizzle of a batting-practice fastball.

  • Feh: it’s a ballpark disguised as a shopping mall. This proves that there is no soul in Fort Bend. The least they could do is re-create some rice dryers around it, in homage to the county’s once-famous world export crop.

  • Yes it’s dreck and looks like the very DEFINITION of suburban tilt-wall buildings on slab. However, functionally, and as George Carlin quipped so well, the object of baseball is to “Go Home, to be safe at home!” so why not provide for those everyday errands, like a trip to CVS, during the seventh-inning stretch?

  • Why couldn’t they just carve it out of a field of corn…?

  • LSU had a similar idea for dual-use years ago. After the state legislature banned construction of a stadium… They builta dormitory… In the shape of a stadium. They housed students in them until the 80s

  • Where is the Applebee’s?

  • im shocked that posters on here would do nothing but criticize (unless it’s a dated 1970’s house, and then people think tacky is cool). frankly, i think it will be perfect for the community. how else would you build it? this design will integrate it in to the neighborhood, so there isn’t a giant stadium and parking lot going to waste 98% of the time (like reliant, toyota center, minute maid, and most other parks).

  • htownproud, you do get that they’re not actually providing a strip center here- just the look of one, right?

  • I can see the bumperstickers now…

    “stopsugarlandstadium.org”

  • Is David Weekly building it?

  • Someone should contact Brooks Robinson and tell him we expect better in Houston. Don’t tell me ARA will do the food also. Probably another missed opportunity for something fun. Be careful Brooks, this is a very competitive market.

  • Those are quite literally old SUGAR CANE fields of Imperial Sugar, NOT corn fields :-) Boring architecture or not, I live about 1.5 miles from this site and I’m looking forward to it, but I preferred the idea to call them the Sugar Land Imperials. It’s our team (Sugar Land), our tax money, who gives a flip what the region thinks.