What’s it like when you attend an
event at a venue you designed?
It’s certainly addictive. I remember being in Reliant
Stadium on opening day with 67,000 fans shouting at
the top of their lungs, excited at the NFL coming back
to Houston. The second the roof started opening for
the game – the fans went wild. I still get goose bumps
thinking about that. It was the moment that I got
hooked on designing stadia, and have devoted my
entire career to it. It can be distracting though.
Whether it’s my building or not, a sport designer is
constantly looking at the concourses, seating bowl,
and how guests interact with the building. If I’m in
another designer’s building, I will think about why
they did this or that. There is always something to learn
and room for improvement.
From when you started to now, what
was the industry like back then and
how have you seen it evolve?
When I first came into the industry, I worked on a
computer that was in the paper supply room. The
company didn’t have anywhere else to put it, because
they didn’t really know what it was. I worked on one of
the first Macintosh computers while everyone else at
HOK Sports was drawing down stadium designs with
ink on mylar. It was an incredible time in history to
start my career.
I remember using early modelling software to break
the mold of rigidity in the stadium and arena designs.
That was really refreshing. In some ways, we are still
pushing to challenge this rigidity, but now thirty years
later, we build stadia in a completely different way.
Instead of using a stack of two-dimensional drawings
As an employee of HOK Sport, I lived in Toronto
for a while and worked for the local architecture firm
there, and I really enjoyed it. There are some pieces
of my early work in that project, but I was very much
a junior designer at the time. I wasn’t really making
any major decisions, but I suppose I was a significant
enough part of the design team to spend that time in
Toronto working with the team as they developed the
venue’s design.
However, the first project that I felt I had a lot of
leadership on, and would consider my first project, was
Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas. It is now called
NRG Stadium. It was the first retractable roof stadium
in the country for the NFL, and opened with 67,000
seats. I was the design lead for the project, and I
coordinated and worked with the rest of the team in
that role. The other project happening at the same time
was Wembley Stadium. I was traveling to London to
work with the HOK Sport London office and the entire
Wembley Stadium team. I designed the seating bowl,
building geometry, and seating sections of the stadium.
I would not, humbly, take any credit for the exterior or
the arch. But it was a fascinating project to work on,
and I met a lot of incredible people that I am still in
regular contact with.
INTERVIEW
Manica advised the Raiders to
feature a EFTE fixed roof instead
of a retractable system, as well
as an open-up wall that offers
views of the Las Vegas strip
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