The Tennessee Titans christened their new home, Adelphia Stadium in Nashville, Tenn., with a rousing year in 1999, taking the team to the Super Bowl in its first year in its new facility. That gave fans a long season in which to enjoy the new stadium, which features precast concrete components for seating and walkways and parts of the exterior cladding.

The 67,000-seat, open-air, natural-grass stadium was designed specifically for football but can be expanded to as many as 75,000 seats for selected events, explains Ben Barnert, principal at the HOK Sports Facilities Group in Kansas City, which designed the stadium. It features precast concrete triple risers, vomitory walls and other precast structural elements that combined with glass curtain wall to create the stadium's exterior design.

"We chose precast concrete components because of the time restrictions on the schedule, the ease of construction that they gave us and the economics involved," says Barnert. Cost savings was a significant factor for the exterior design, he notes. "We explored the entire gamut of exterior options, including masonry, architectural precast and many other materials. We wanted to achieve that smooth, concrete look, and we discovered that using structural precast concrete gave us the look we desired and worked well from a design standpoint. And it also met the owners' needs from a budget standpoint."

Indeed, Barnert says that initial estimates for a masonry design costed out at approximately $22 per square foot. The final budget for the precast structural option was in the $10-$11 range - less than half the cost. "It was a considerable savings and still allowed us to accomplish what we were after." The components feature a steel-form finish that provided a smooth, durable look.

Using precast concrete for the risers and vomitory walls saved considerable time, as the triple risers could be delivered and lifted into place quickly, with their fabrication proceeding while other work was underway. "Having those pieces come to us shop-made saved us having to work with forms in the field," Barnert says. "And they fit up nice and quickly because of the close tolerances they can achieve in the plant."

To meet the tight schedule, precaster Metromont Prestress Company fabricated the required 3,600 pieces at three of its plants (Atlanta, Nashville, and Dalton, Ga.) Close communication allowed the appropriate pieces to be delivered at the correct time to keep the site humming without overloading it with extraneous materials.

A key challenge came in finishing off the top rows of the stadium seating, where supports for safety fencing had to be embedded in the components. "This turned out not to be any big deal," Barnert says. "It all went very smoothly."

In fact the entire construction schedule moved smoothly, thanks in part to the long spans offered by the precast components. This reduced the piece count and sped up erection while offering design flexibility. Harsh weather caused significant delays - including the loss of two cranes during a major tornado. However, while other materials at the site were damaged or destroyed in the tornado, all of the precast concrete pieces remained undamaged and work could continue immediately after clean-up.