Hurricanes and the sail effect dominated the thinking of the design team for the nation's first retractable-roof baseball park engineered to withstand 146-mph winds. To keep the lid on the 36,000-seat new Miami Marlins Ballpark during severe storms, without adding too much extra weight, the roof's structural engineer called for parking the roof panels 10 ft apart, in an almost-closed position. The gap-mode strategy, which reduces the sail effect, lightened up the roof by some 1,000 tons of steel, the engineer says.
"Putting a big sail on top of this stadium in a hurricane-prone region was the [project's] biggest challenge," says Aaron White, a principal in the Tampa office of structural engineer Walter P Moore (WPM).