The spacey, curving roof over Inglewood’s NFL stadium is coming together as the venue closes on completion.
The future home of the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers—officially, the SoFi Stadium—is now about 85 percent finished. There are about 3,200 workers on the site daily, working to ensure the stadium opens in July, according to the Los Angeles Stadium and Entertainment District at Hollywood Park.
The stadium’s roof sports sections of the clear plastic cover made of a transparent material called ETFE that will eventually cover the entire canopy. Underneath, there will be a 70,000-square-foot “Oculus” display hanging from the rafters.
Photos taken earlier this month on a media tour of the stadium show the enormous Oculus being assembled on the floor. The dual-sided video display will be the first of its kind, according to the Los Angeles Stadium and Entertainment District.
The curving roof will also hang over a 2.5-acre open air plaza, a 6,000-seat performance venue, and a kind of reception plaza in front of the stadium entrance.
The $2.6 billion stadium was originally slated to be complete in time for the 2019 football season, but a rainy year pushed the opening date.
The stadium is rising out of a giant 300-acre property that once housed the Hollywood Park racetrack. Also planned for the project site is a whole new neighborhood that will hold shops, restaurants, a hotel, parks, an artificial lake, and 2,500 housing units.
That component will open in phases, with the first phase scheduled to open by February 2022, when the stadium will host Super Bowl LVI.
Many locals are already feeling crunched by rising retail and residential rents and home prices in the neighborhood. In March 2019, the city moved to enact a temporary freeze on evictions, but the question remains what will happen in the long-term to the historically black enclave once the stadium is complete and a new light rail stop opens in Inglewood’s downtown.
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