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Excerpt from Only in New Mexico

Van Dorn Hooker

In the spring of 1965 I received a call from President Popejoy asking me to select an architect and bring him to a meeting in his office to discuss a new athletic facility. Joe Boehning had been by to see me recently about doing some work for the university. Knowing he had been active in athletics while a student at UNM, I called Boehning and we met at Popejoy’s office with Bob King, basketball coach, and Pete McDavid, director of athletics. Popejoy said he wanted to build a basketball arena that would seat 15,000 or more. He suggested it be built across University Boulevard west of the football stadium, using the same type of construction that made the stadium so economical to build: excavate a bowl for the seating area. King wanted the seating to come as close to the playing court as possible. Popejoy said there should be no columns to interfere with any spectator’s view. Suggestions were made to make the playing area large enough for tennis competition and to put a hockey rink underneath a removable basketball floor. These ideas were turned down – it would be designed for basketball only. Above all, the arena had to be built as inexpensively as possible, preferably for less than $1 million, and it had to be ready for the first game of the 1966-67 season.
The Board of Regents approved the appointment of Boehning as the architect in June. He came up with a preliminary design of a round building using suspended steel cables supporting a catenary configured roof. When a uniformly think cable is suspended between two points, the curve it forms is called a catenary curve. There were to be forty-eight concrete columns thirty-one feet high supporting the cables. Precast concrete panels would be attached to the cables and the roofing material applied over them. With this inverted domelike roof structure, it is no wonder the Albuquerque Tribune printed a section drawn through the center arena upside down. Estimates showed this scheme to be too expensive.

    The next design Boehning presented had a more conventional roof framing system and a grade-level concourse with about one-third of the seats above it. Popejoy turned it down, saying he did not want people on the concourse interfering with the view of people behind it. Boehning then placed the entire seating bank below grade.
    I suggested we look at a long-span roof system manufactured by the Behlen Company in Columbus, Nebraska. This system was an expansion of their construction methods used to build steel-framed farm buildings. Behlen had never built a roof with flat top trusses of the span we were talking about, but their engineers had no doubt they could do it.
    The Behlen system consisted of fifteen-foot-high light-weight steel trusses spaced forty-one inches on center. The corrugated steel roof deck and ceiling were bolted to the trusses to form the top and bottom chords of the trusses. It has been referred to as a stressed skin system. The roof had a 7 ½ - inch camber built in which reduced to five inches when the scaffolding was removed. The ceiling panels allowed the workmen to move about freely in the truss space to install mechanical, electrical, and sound systems. Because of the depth of the trusses, mechanical equipment rooms could be placed in the four corners containing evaporative coolers that distributed cooled air through the ceiling space formed by the trusses into the seating space below.
    Boehning squared the circle, so to speak, into a 294-foot by 338-foot rectangle that covered approximately 2.3 acres. The top of the roof parapet was set at thirty-five feet above grade. The clear span over the playing floor and seating area was 252 feet. The arena floor was thirty-seven feet below the concourse level. There were thirty-one rows of chair-back seats and forty-three rows of bench seating. Below grade were dressing and locker rooms, a mechanical equipment room, and other support spaces all reached by a ramp from the arena floor with access to the outside for service vehicles. Ticket booths were located in the northeast and southwest corners of the building. Concession stands and restrooms were located off the concourse.
    Frank Bridgers, the mechanical engineer on the project and a partner in the firm Bridgers and Paxton, had a difficult time explaining to Popejoy why so much cooling would be required if the temperature outside was near freezing, but lights and 14,000-plus excited fans generate a lot of heat, which he estimated to be about 4 million BTUs per hour when there was a full house.
    A concrete frame supported the Behlen system and the roof over the concourse. The exterior walls were concrete block and the floors were all concrete except the playing court, which was hardwood. King wanted a firm floor just like the one in Johnson Gymnasium so wood sleepers, or nailing strips, were specified under the subfloor.
    The acoustical system was designed by Dr. C.R. Boner, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who specialized in sound systems for large auditoriums and sport facilities. He used the truss space to locate speakers throughout the arena and special circuiting to eliminate echo.
    Bids were taken for construction of the Basketball Arena (302) on December 16, 1965. K.L. House Construction Company was the low bidder. The construction plan called for building the concrete frame that would support the roof first, then erecting the roof and spraying the acoustical treatment to the underside, and finally excavating for the arena floor and seating banks. This saved an enormous cost in scaffolding, which only had to be about 15 feet high. In order to protect the acoustical coating, all exhausts from excavating equipment and trucks had to be turned toward the floor. But even with this precaution, the coating suffered some discoloration.
    The final seat count was 14,850 and the cost per seat was $116 to make it one of the least expensive arenas ever built. In the years following completion, architects, coaches, and administrators from many different universities across the country, and one group from Mexico, came to see how it had been done.
    The building was completed in time for the December 1, 1966 game with Abilene Christian College, which the Lobos won 62-53. When the arena celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 1996, it welcomed its eight-millionth fan. Sportswriter Richard Stevens had no kind words to say about the design other than it had become a legend. He wrote, “Heck, let’s just come out and say it: It’s ugly.”
    I never thought of the Basketball Arena as being ugly; I saw it as an economical, functional answer to a very difficult architectural problem. Many architects agreed with me because it received an honor award in 1966 from the Albuquerque chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The later expansion of the arena received awards from the New Mexico Society of Architects and the Western Mountain Region of the AIA. The arena was never designed to be an architectural gem, but the university certainly got its money’s worth many times over. Boehning did a good job. Imagine, if you can, what it would have looked like in the Pueblo Style. In 1999, Sports Illustrated ranked the Pit as thirteenth among the top twenty “favorite places in the world to view sports.” It was second among college facilities, behind Duke University’s Cameron Indoor Stadium at number four. Rick Wright of the Albuquerque Journal wrote, “the Pit, after all, is more than a building… It truly is a showcase of college basketball.”