Recession Helped Put Designers On New Path

Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal 

Sports Business Journal profiled five designers whose careers had been rerouted by the recession. Pendulum was the one that started in it.

By the time the piece ran the studio had grown to seven designers. The $12 million park in central Illinois had opened the previous year for the Frontier League’s Normal CornBelters and Heartland Community College’s baseball program, laid out with a dirt free synthetic surface, and is on this site as The Corn Crib. The Green Bay Bullfrogs had hired Pendulum for a $10 million park pending financing, and the firm was competing for a Wisconsin job against one of the two largest sports practices in the country, having already beaten both of them to win Normal.

The second half of the story was a separate company Cole had formed, Modular Products, which designed temporary loge boxes for outdoor stadiums at a fraction of the cost of permanent suites. One aluminum structure with fifteen swivel chairs, a drink rail, buffet space, a mini refrigerator and a roof cover cost $35,000, and it could be unbolted after an event, leaving three to four thousand permanent seats in place. The firm had bid outdoor club seating tied to the renovation of Memorial Stadium at California and had talked with UNC Charlotte about a football stadium then in development.

Cole’s account of how the practice started was unglamorous and exact: a 36 month bank loan and a simple but forward thinking business plan.

Source: “Recession helped put designers on new paths” by Don Muret, Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, January 10 to 16, 2011, page 21.

The framework Pendulum uses to judge a venue as a long term civic and financial system is set out in S.C.O.R.E.