Art, Architecture, Icon: Mercedes-Benz Stadium

Twenty years ago the Spanish city of Bilbao was a dying seaport — ugly, post-industrial, scarred by terrorism. Locating Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum there (at Gehry’s insistence) was an audacious gamble that revealed how art and architecture can transform the culture of an entire region. Iconic buildings like Australia’s Sydney Opera House, Foundación Louis Vuitton in Paris, and now Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium have made good cities even better by enhancing their reputations, boosting their economies, revitalizing their cores.

This presentation focuses on Mercedes-Benz Stadium: a transformational, design-centric project that has made innovative architecture and engineering, an extensive art collection, and committed urban revitalization its legacy to one of America’s most important historic cities. Presented by Lana Rigsby, whose firm, Rigsby Hull, just released a 472-page monograph about the Stadium.

This event is co-hosted by MODA and Miami Ad School at Portfolio Center.

About Lana Rigsby

Rigsby Hull president and creative director Lana Rigsby has been honored internationally for intelligent design and restrained, elegant expression for nearly forty years. An outspoken thinker and practitioner in the field of communications, Lana has authored publications, chaired conferences, lectured at universities and institutions throughout the US, and curated US and international design forums. She served as National Director for the American Institute of Graphic Arts and is a founding member of the AIGA’s Texas Chapter. Rigsby Hull’s work is part of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s permanent collection, the Denver Art Museum, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University, and has been published extensively and included in NYTime’s critic Steven Heller’s Timeline: A Century of Design Milestones. In its 50th Anniversary issue, Communication Arts cites Rigsby Hull as among the most influential American design firms of the past half century.