EwingCole has designed the NFL’s New Meadowlands Stadium, pictured here in a rendering. It will open in 2010.

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Skanska Safie-Rosetti Hunt Construction

EwingCole would be hard-pressed to find a project more high-profile than one seen by millions of people across the country every Sunday from September to January, but there are plenty in the firm’s portfolio that just might fit the bill. Drawing upon its years of experience designing large sports complexes, including Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park, EwingCole was selected to design and engineer the new home of the New York Giants and the New York Jets of the National Football League.

The firm has a history with the Meadowlands, having masterplanned the first Giants Stadium in the 1970s.

EwingCole didn’t start out designing major league sports venues, however; it began by developing the now-defunct Liberty Bell Racetrack in Philadelphia, and from there many other horse tracks from the Meadowlands Racetrack in the 1970s to the Singapore Racetrack in 2000 and a racetrack and entertainment complex in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in 2007. President John Gerbner says the firm’s rise from racetracks to multipurpose venues such as the new Meadowlands stadium exemplifies its ability to gain knowledge and build on it.

“We become experts in our clients’ businesses,” Gerbner says. For this, he credits the firm’s close relationships with both its clients and its employees.

“We look at our strength as being the long-term relationship with our employees and our clients,” CFO Joe Kelly says. These strong bonds give EwingCole the knowledge base and skills necessary to pull off a project as complicated and sensitive as a major-league sports facility. “The more complex and involved a building is, the better we are; that’s our strength,” Kelly says.

Gerbner calls EwingCole a “practice-driven” firm, and says that the expertise it gains by taking on new projects is used to work up to bigger and better things.

Employees in Control
To ensure that it attracts the best candidates and retains them, EwingCole provides them with career opportunities for growth. “We have a homegrown philosophy that has worked very well,” Project Manager Pradeep Patel says.

“We have an unwritten rule that we bring the new generation of employees into the ownership.”
Kelly says EwingCole has mechanisms in place that transfer partial ownership of the firm to a select group of 40 employees. When an employee-owner reaches the age of 65, he or she must sell back their shares in the company. “This approach makes room for younger employees to come into ownership,” Kelly says.

Offering employees such an opportunity has become even more important in recent years, Hebden says. That’s because the pool of talented professional candidates has declined as fields such as computers have had more success attracting young people.

Being Green
Citizens Bank Park, the new home of the Philadelphia Phillies, is a tangible example of not only EwingCole’s design prowess, but also its dedication to green design. Vice President Mark Hebden says the firm believes green design isn’t only beneficial to the environment, but makes good business sense for clients, as well. “Just from an environmental stewardship point of view, we believe that we have an obligation as professionals to work together to design facilities for our clients that are energy efficient,” Hebden says.

‘Deliberate Growth’
Design/build has caught on in a big way throughout the industry, and the new Giants/Jets stadium is an example of how far the technique has come. Patel says clients are looking for a single point of contact throughout the process, and design/build firms are the simple solution for that.

The 2.1 million-square-foot Giants/Jets stadium is nearly twice the size of the original Giants Stadium. More than 83,000 seats, 10,000 club seats and 200 luxury suites will make up the venue.

“The New Meadowlands Stadium is one of the largest design/build projects in the country,” Hebden says.