When the New York Yankees' $1.5 billion stadium opened last April, it was the most expensive stadium ever built in the U.S.—until next year, anyway, when the new $1.6 billion Jets-Giants football stadium opens in New Jersey. The recession may have killed the last decade's Great Skyscraper Race, which saw rival architects egg each other's towers—and price tags—higher and higher, but in stadium design, spectacle still matters.

And bold new designs are getting easier, thanks to a new program from engineering software developer Autodesk called NavisWorks, which helps architects and engineers in a notoriously fragmented industry coordinate giant super-complex structures. "It's the Switzerland of model-based construction," explains Timothy Douglas, Autodesk's construction industry segment manager. Developed independently but acquired by Autodesk in 2007, NavisWorks pulls together all the disparate strands of data that make up these massive projects and weaves them into a single 3-D model that everyone—designers, fabricators, even owners—can understand.
Previously, stadium builders had to navigate a minefield of complicated data and incompatible software, explains Jim Barrett, manager of virtual construction technologies for Turner Constuction, which worked with ubiquitous stadium architecture firm Populous (formerly HOK) to build Yankee Stadium. "You'd have architects working in Revit, structural engineers in Tekla, subcontractors using HydroCAD or QuickCAD," Barrett breathlessly recalls. "You'd have plumbing hitting ductwork, ductwork hitting steel, steel hitting precast concrete."

So it was no surprise, considering the size of the project, that a few months before opening day something did go wrong. "We were moving so quickly we were fabricating parts while we were still going through shop drawings on the steel, and we started to find all these problems," he says. Specifically, Barrett and his team noticed that a set of stairs on the 400 level was bolted down over an expansion joint, instead of hovering above it. A near disaster.

But they discovered these issues in renderings, not on the job site. "In the past, we wouldn't have caught that until it was being built," Barrett says, "but now we can solve problems on the computer and not in the field." With everyone contributing to and working off the same model, the level of detail is unprecedented and conflicts are easy to spot. NavisWorks works so well, in fact, that fabricators can build right from the model; they don't need their own set of drawings. "It's not a cartoon," Barrett says. "It's reality. As modeled, as installed."

Walter P. Moore, the engineering firm behind another Populous-designed project, the $500 million Target Field, which will become the new home of the Minnesota Twins next spring, also used NavisWorks to share data with the Minneapolis planning department. This allowed their team to make sure the stadium's signature element, its glowing roof canopy, stood out in the midst of train lines, city streets, and Interstate 394.

NavisWorks is making flourishes like the Twins' UFO-like roof more common, Douglas says. "Contractors can take on much more complex shapes and geometries because they can do it with much less risk—they can visualize it and translate it into materials and construction costs easily. If you're relying on a light table and a stack of drawings and somebody showed up with a stadium that looked like a spaceship, you'd have to think twice."