Football season is fast approaching and every city throughout America is preparing to cheer on their team. There probably isn’t a team more excited to start their year than the Minnesota Vikings this year, as they finally get to plan in their brand new stadium, the US Bank Stadium.
In January of 2014, demolition officially began on the Metrodome, the Vikings previous stadium. The Metrodome, built by Barton-Malow, was home to the Vikings since 1982 and cost around $55 million ($179 million in 2016 dollars). It was also the home stadium for the Minnesota Twins from 1982 to 2009. For football, the old Metrodome held a maximum capacity of 64,121 people.
For the past 2 and a half years, the brand new US Bank Stadium has been under construction, so the Vikings have had to make a temporary home at the University of Minnesota campus, which opened in 2009 and holds a capacity of 52,525. The US Bank Stadium, which is being carried out by Mortenson Construction, officially opened its doors on Saturday, July 23 to allow fans to get their first look of all the hard work that occurred the past two seasons. In total, the new stadium will hold 66,200 people and cost over $1 billion, almost 20 times what the Metrodome cost to build. By comparison, the outlandish AT&T stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, cost $1.3 billion and holds a capacity of 80,000 people. Though the new stadium will only hold a couple thousand more attendees, it’s actually almost 2 times larger than the old stadium (1,750,000 vs 900,000 square feet), has over twice the amount of restrooms, over a 100 more concession stands, and a video board 13 times larger than the old.
Below you can watch a combined timelapse video of the demolition of the Metrodome and the construction of US Bank Standium. Below that, you can take a tour of the inside of the new stadium alongside of some of the Vikings players.
Inside Tour Video
While still new in the construction industries, robots are typically designed to perform a specific task in a highly precise and efficient way, like the rebar tying robot, Tybot or the brick-laying robot Hadrian X. More recently, though, robots are being imagined as platforms for 3rd party companies to develop hardware and accessories to attach to the base robot, like the Boston Dynamics robotic dog, Spot. I recently came across a new robot, called Baubot, which hopes to one day perform tasks using every tool on a typical jobsite.