New Orleans’ Superdome Receives Community-Driven Renovation

After the horrors of Katrina, at first, their work was more salvage than anything else. The building had lost much of its 10-acre, metal-decked roof, suffered severe interior flooding, and its structure was badly compromised. Initial work included removing 3.8 million gallons of water and 4,000 tons of debris, replacing the entire roof, repairing the stands and field, shoring up the badly damaged steel structure and reskinning the facade with 400,000-square-feet of champagne gold anodized aluminum panels. (The same material and color as the original Superdome, which also happens to match the team colors of a key tenant, the New Orleans Saints.)

“The situation was initially pretty grim,” says Trahan Architects partner Brad McWhirter “We were asking, ‘could the building be saved? How bad was the damage?’”. Their early success would become a milestone in the city’s recovery, he notes. “It was like, ‘if they could build this quickly, we could put our lives back together.’” 

In subsequent years Trahan was asked to add enhancements, including new seats, club suites, video boards, and concession stands. This work, often performed on-call, culminated in the current effort—a more ambitious and systematic overhaul designed to make the Superdome an elite venue for years to come. It was first envisioned in a 2017 Capital Improvements Master Plan led by Trahan in collaboration with Gensler, with Trahan leading implementation as the Prime Architectural team.

Work began right after the January 2020 College Football Championship, says Evan Holmes, general manager at ASM Global, the venue’s operator. “Joe Burrow (then quarterback of the winning team, LSU) was still smoking cigars in the locker room, and we were popping ceiling tiles,” he says.

The core of the renovation was to make the Superdome a better place to see an event—creating a warmer, better connected, and more humane building, something Trahan specializes in. In terms of circulation, the team removed four of the stadium’s hulking concrete ramps and replaced them with stairs, elevators (including express elevators that help visitors finally avoid having to switch cars halfway up) and shimmering, multi-level atria intended to loosely evoke the crowded, joyful thoroughfares of New Orleans.  

Removing the ramps also opened up room for wider concourses and a bevy of new amenities including forty-yard-long bars, grab-and-go markets, improved concessions, and open terraces—cut out of the seating bowl and extending from the field to the exterior—all organized into localized “faubourgs,” like the city itself. Additional upgrades include new field level suites, improved restrooms, new ADA access seating sections, a thorough locker room upgrade, and significantly more energy efficient new electrical, lighting and HVAC systems.

Another major component of the technical work was the installation of a new culinary ventilation system, cutting through the thick facade and allowing vendors to finally cook food on site. (Meals formerly had to be prepared in another location, well in advance, and brought over.) Once limited to generic arena staples, the Superdome’s offerings now include local delights like chicken cordon bleu, baked potatoes with crawfish cream sauce, smoked sausage sandwiches, and hand-breaded shrimp. “This was an expected thing in a place like New Orleans,” says McWhirter. Holmes notes that people are ordering about 30 percent more food now.

Despite all these updates, Trahan didn’t want to reinvent the Superdome. They resolutely focused on maintaining the legacy of a building that was quite revolutionary for its time, and still is. (Incorporating 20,000 tons of steel framing, it’s still the world’s largest entirely steel-constructed arena.) For instance, instead of covering over its intricate web of structure inside, the firm in several places revealed original steel bracing. The atria, lit by massive, daylight-evoking LEDs from above, employ the same champagne gold aluminum (in the form of extruded aluminum tubes) and concrete surfaces as the exterior, further warmed with wood, stone, and dark metal finishes. 

“Stadium designers usually approach these buildings as fashion,” says Trahan Architects founder Trey Trahan. “What are the latest colors, fonts, and styles? That results in a stadium that quickly becomes out of date. Our work is about uniqueness of a place, its culture, its history, and how does a building age and patina over time?”

ASM Global’s Holmes notes, the stadium has survived all these years largely because of its massive size—the 83,000-seat capacity is one of the most copious in the NFL—its location close to both the city’s convention center and its historic French Quarter, and its ongoing role as a symbol of New Orleans. “It comes from a time when they built these buildings as civic monuments,” he says. “The Superdome still has a sense of place.”  But most important, it’s still successful, not just for the teams and events that occupy it, but for the area around it.


“This is a community venue that’s going to drive people to the city,” he says. “When they’re done they will filter out and spend time at the restaurants and hotels. It’s an investment into the state and the city and the region.”

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