Georgia Dome fun facts
The dome was designed by a joint venture of Heery International Inc., Rosser Fabrap Inc., and Thompson Ventulett Stainback & Associates.
There are no peach trees on the dome grounds
There are 150 trees on the grounds of the Georgia Dome - Yoshino cherry; willow oak; red sunset maple and white dogwood.
It is 275 feet from the floor to the top of the dome, equal to a 27- story building
Including specialists and the cleanup crews, 4,000 people worked on the dome.
The basketball floor for the dome is the one used for the 1992 All- Star Game in Orlando.
Original plans called for the south edge of the dome to be above the MARTA line. Moving it north 12 feet saved $5 million.
There are 289 windows in the Northside Drive entrance.
When the dome is in a half-house configuration, about 4,000 seat holders will have to be relocated.
The entrances on the south side of the dome are at ground level, but are one story up on the north side.
At it’s widest point, the dome is 830 feet.
In 1982, it cost about $79 an hour to light the dome.
The dome exterior contains 80,000 square feet of glass.
— AJC archives
Anyone who has ventured near the Georgia World Congress Center complex in recent months can attest to the trafic congestion that construction of the Mercedes Benz stadiuim has caused. Those who were in Atlanta area while the current Georgia Dome was being built may say it feels like deja vu all over again. The Photo Vault looks back 25 years ago, when the Georgia Dome was in the thick of construction.
Just like today, discussions centered around who would pay for the stadium, how fans would get in and out and what would it be called.
The 70,500-seat structure is a building that attempts to give the feel of an outdoor venue. While critcs at the time took issue with its aesthetics, many marveled its multifuntionality. After all, the million-square-foot facility is a football stadium only a relatively few days a year and a multi-use structure the rest of the time.
An AJC report at the time gave the design a less than glowing review:
The design team created a 15-story rectangular structure that envelops the lower portion of the 27-story oval seating bowl. Its enamel-panel facade is painted white with a pattern of plum and turquoise horizontal bands. The corners are cut at 45-degree angles and sheathed in glass to announce the four entries. The roof of the seating bowl, the largest oval cable-supported structure ever built, has a rather shallow arc, peaking like a circus tent.
But the results are ungainly. The proportions aren’t pleasing (not even as harmonious as those of the Houston Astrodome, the first domed stadium), and the parts don’t cohere. Like the facility itself, the design is trying to be all things to all people, but the combination of a Big Top top and office-building bottom ends up looking schizophrenic instead.
Even though it’s sunk five stories into the ground, it looks gargantuan - the architectural analogue to the giant Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man in “Ghostbusters.”
The colors - intended to camouflage the scale, unify the parts and connect the Dome to the rest of the Georgia World Congress Center complex - are a major culprit. The turquoise is a brazen, almost cheesy shade with jarring associations to ’50s kitchens, especially in conjunction with the flat white panels. It’s too blue to meld with the green glass. The two-tone gray split-faced concrete blocks at the base add to the disjunction.
The plum, while not an offensive color, doesn’t fulfill its purpose as the visual link to the rest of the complex. The Omni roof may actually be deep purple, as project director Scott Braley asserts, but it looks rusty brown. The predominant color of the World Congress Center is the gray of the concrete. The connection between the lighter shade of plum and the colors of the rest of the complex isn’t clear.
Finally, the patterning of the color bands draws attention to the Dome’s size rather than diminishing it.
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