Monday LEEDoff: Giants & Jets Meadowlands Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey

In the wake of the Giants’ and Jets’ first victories of the season yesterday (over Washington and Miami, respectively), the new football stadium currently under construction in New Jersey’s Meadowlands for the two teams deserves mention here at gbNYC. While it’s unclear whether the project will seek LEED certification (it just broke ground on September 5), it will attempt to comply with LEED “to the extent feasible.” However, its greenest feature might be that there will only be one shared stadium for the clubs rather than two separate facilities as was originally proposed.

The Giants and Jets are co-developing the 82,500 seat, $1.3 billion project that will replace Giants Stadium, which opened back in 1976. Plans for the two teams to share the new building came together after the Jets were rebuffed in their bid for a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan, which the city had proposed as the centerpiece of its failed bid for the 2012 Olympics, and a last ditch attempt to bring them back to Queens (after their 1984 move out of Shea Stadium to the Meadowlands) never really got off the ground. The new stadium should open up in time for the 2010 season and will host college football, international soccer, and concerts in addition to twenty NFL games each season. The 2.1 million square foot facility will rise out of forty acres in the northeast corner of the current Giants Stadium parking lot, just to the east of the Meadowlands Racetrack. Links to more images are below after the jump.

The exterior of the stadium will consist of eight levels of aluminum louvers that will be illuminated to reflect the colors of the Giants (blue) and the Jets (green) depending on which team is playing on any given Sunday. Sustainable design features will include an artificial turf playing surface, low-E glass on the stadium exterior, and a $216 million New Jersey Transit train station that will provide patrons with access to Penn Station in Manhattan (via the Secaucus Junction transfer station) in as little as fifteen minutes; the teams expect the station to take 5,000 cars out of the parking lots each Sunday.

The project team includes design-builder Skanska USA of Parsippany, New Jersey, which has already awarded a $90 million contract to Maryland-based structural steel fabricator Structal US (a division of Canam Group of Quebec). George Heinlein and 360 Architecture of Kansas City are the design architects, with EwingCole of Philadelphia the architect of record as Skanska’s design-build partner. The design team also includes David Rockwell and Bruce Mau Design; Tishman Lehrer is the owners’ representative. You can find more images and video via the New York/New Jersey Football link below.

• Jets and Giants Break Ground (NY/NJ Football)
• New Stadium- Images (NY/NJ Football)