VenuesNow: Designers Discuss Post-Coronavirus Changes

VenuesNow Magazine - Designers Discuss Post-Coronavirus Changes

featuring Pendulum Principal/Owner Jonathan Cole, written by Don Muret, March 25, 2020

Ten days after American sport shut down, VenuesNow asked designers what would change. Pendulum’s answer was already standing in Hartford.

Dunkin’ Park opened in 2017 for the Hartford Yard Goats, the Colorado Rockies Class AA affiliate, with touchless systems distributed through the 6,121 seat facility. They went in for energy savings. In March 2020 they turned out to be infection control.

The club’s president, Tim Restall, described working in the building just before the shutdown and realising how much of a ballpark you normally touch: hands free lights, sinks, soap dispensers and hand dryers were all doing quiet work. His staff had taken to propping every door open in the morning so nobody had to touch a handle.

That is the whole lesson of the piece, and it is a pro forma lesson rather than a public health one. A specification chosen for operating cost turned out to carry a second return nobody had priced. Buildings that are cheap to run are usually also the ones that adapt when the ground moves.

Source: “Designers discuss post-coronavirus changes” by Don Muret, VenuesNow, March 25, 2020.

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.