Dan Meis, the architect of Hill Dickinson Stadium has revealed he wants to win the contract for Birmingham City’s ambitious 62,000 capacity project
Hill Dickinson Stadium architect Dan Meis wants to work on a new project in English football. And it could be even bigger than Everton’s new home on the Mersey waterfront after declaring his interest to win the contract for Birmingham City’s ambitious plans to construct a 62,000-capacity replacement for St Andrew’s.
The Championship club’s owners, NFL legend Tom Brady and Tom Wagner, from Knighthead, want to build a new Sports Quarter in Birmingham, with billions earmarked for a vast project which includes a sports campus and training facilities and at the heart of it would be a new stadium, over twice the size of City’s home since 1906 which holds 29,409.
As first reported by the Daily Mail, Meis, who was ironically speaking in the city at the SVB conference at Villa Park, home of Birmingham’s neighbours Aston Villa, announced that his firm AECOM is “in the hunt” for both the new Quarter and stadium project.
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The 64-year-old was asked what he had in the pipeline and declared: “Obviously there’s the Birmingham stadium project and we’re in the hunt for that,” adding that a 62,000-seat stadium and 15-20,000-capacity arena would also feature with the aim “to host a whole range of international events not solely in football but [including] American football and rugby.”
A year after their 2023 takeover, Brady and Wagner’s Knighthead bout the 48-acre former Birmingham Wheels motorsport site in Bordesley, less than a mile away from St Andrew’s and the city centre. Owned by the council, more than £17million of the government’s levelling up fund has been allocated for remediation works although chairman Wagner has estimated the cost at between £2-3billion with the hope of a new stadium opening for the 2030/31 season.
Having spoken to Meis at his New York City office in July, the ECHO understands that his desire to win the Birmingham City project is longstanding and it is something that he has been working on for several months. Having put so much of his heart and soul into his work with Everton, Meis spoke about what might come next at the time.
He told the ECHO: “It’s really an interesting challenge because I’ve been designing stadiums for something like 35 years. I’ve had incredible opportunities from being able to do the Staples Center in my hometown where my son was growing up, there was something really special about that in L.A. with the Lakers with Kobe (Bryant) and Shaq (O’Neal).
“There were projects in Japan that were technically unbelievable compared to anything I could have ever imagined before. But I’ve never had a project that so got in my blood, the way this did.
“I think it was something that I recognised pretty early. It was an opportunity that wasn’t just a building anymore.
“How do you really become part of a fanbase and a community and reimagine something like Goodison that had been around for over 100 years? It was a home, so it wasn’t really about architecture in terms of the stadium, it was about taking that experience forwards.
“There’s still a bit of trepidation over how people feel about it when it’s fully open. I want to see it provide a really incredible advantage to the club – on the pitch obviously – but then at some point, I have to move on and try and find something like it, and it’s going to be difficult.”
Meis, who would subsequently attend Everton’s first two matches at Hill Dickinson Stadium, which holds 52,769, against Roma and Brighton & Hove Albion, added: “There’s a lot going on in the UK in particular. Some of them I can talk about, and some of them I can’t.
“It’s interesting because we’re kind of in this period after Tottenham where Everton really is the only new build that we’ve seen in the last few years. It’s an interesting model I think because it’s a club that has an incredible history and it has a unique fanbase.
“It’s not like some of the other cities. But I think that both the challenge of building in a dock, and the other challenges we went through with Covid and losing the sponsorship with some of the issues on the club side, it really is a great success story, just realising it and hopefully it will influence some of the clubs that are looking to build.”