At sports architecture firm Populous, model builders deal with the ...

The company has built more than 1,000 sports stadiums and arenas around the world, including new structures or remodels for 16 NFL teams, 20 MLB teams and 14 NBA and NHL teams.</p><p>It has also re-created 55 of those projects as full presentation models, each a marvel of meticulous craftsmanship. model shop is the largest in-house architectural model shop in the country. Populous, which was called HOK when the model shop was created 13 years ago, is often the first in the country to receive new machines from manufacturers who want to test them in real-world conditions.</p><p>Each year, the shop goes through a semi-trailer full of material: wood, resin, acrylic, Plexiglas, rigid foam, urethane, acid-etched brass, steel mesh, paper, wire, hardware, paint and masking tape.</p><p>The model shop is on the second floor of Populous&rsquo; On display in the ground-floor lobby and second- and third-floor offices are models of the new University of Minnesota football stadium, the Baltimore Ravens football stadium, a partial model of Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., and models of the scoreboard and various fa&ccedil;ade options for the remodeled Yankee Stadium. tiny statues of George Brett and Frank White, and an elaborate facsimile of the crown scoreboard.</p><p>Just last month, the shop completed work on a full model of the Florida Marlins new baseball stadium, which is under construction, and delivered it to Miami. The Marlins commissioned the model to use as a sales tool in their marketing office across the street from the stadium.</p><p>Complete presentation models like the one for the Marlins cost $100,000 to $300,000, depending on size and complexity. </p><p>The shop used all of its computer-driven equipment and all of its traditional shop tools to produce the Marlins model, the first time it had put all of its equipment to work on a single project. It took three months and 2,200 man hours of precision drawing, cutting, painting�, fitting and gluing to complete.</p><p>The very day the Marlins model was going out the door, a rigid foam topography base arrived at the model shop for use in another marquee project that already was well under way: a presentation model of the new Kansas City Wizards stadium in Kansas City, Kan., set to open in June.</p><p>Weeks earlier, as the stadium had begun to rise across the street from the T-Bones&rsquo; </p><p>On the other hand, like the athletes their firm builds facilities for, model builders earn a living doing something most people regard as play. of plans takes place on computers, the majority of work in the model shop is hands on: from mixing dozens of paint colors to represent paving stones, bricks and other surfaces to cutting out tiny acid-etched metal parts and placing them with tweezers.</p><p>In the case of the Wizards model, one of the most daunting challenges was modeling the hundreds of vertical metal &ldquo;fins&rdquo; On the model, the fins average 3/4 of an inch tall and 3/32 of an inch wide.</p><p>The fins are one of the most distinctive features of the stadium, whose lead designers are Jeff Spears and Jon Knight. Knight said.</p><p>To help the co-owners really visualize what the fins would look like, Knight and Spear had the model shop create 22-inch-high mock-ups of a few fins, which show the forms and perforations better than the tiny ones on the full model.</p><p>Partial models, such as the large-scale fins, are an important and large part of the model shop&rsquo;s workload. In addition to helping owners visualize what the finished building will look like, it helps architects explore ideas during the design process.</p><p>For example, Spear and Knight worked with the model shop on four or five &ldquo;cheap, quickie&rdquo; models of the Wizards canopy roof, Knight said, &ldquo;so we could better understand what we were drawing, rather than only looking� at it on a computer.&rdquo;</p><p>The roof on the finished model tested the model builders because the huge trusses &mdash; </p><p>Also, some of the cross bracing in the Wizards canopy roof was left out in the model because it would have appeared too crowded.</p><p>With the Marlins model, timing the speed that the roof would retract was a bit of a mind-bender.</p><p> </p><p>While the stadium roof takes 13 minutes to close, the model roof closes in 2 minutes, which is too fast, but any slower and it would be nearly impossible for the eye to see it moving.</p><p>Sometimes, the model builders have to cheat the scale when using premade accessories such as people, cars and trees. In the Wizards model, for example, the human figures are slightly off scale because no one manufactures people in 1:25.</p><p>Spear and Knight say they were in constant contact with the model shop during the construction of the Wizards model, and they marveled at the result.</p><p>&ldquo;They are really, really talented,&rdquo; he said.</p><p>Indeed, if you visit the Hall of Fame at Kauffman Stadium and study the model of the stadium closely, you&rsquo;ll see two monkeys roaming the grounds &mdash; </p><p>A model commissioned by the Minnesota Twins of their new baseball stadium has an ice fisherman, a monkey catching a train, former governor Jesse Ventura, and Paul Bunyon and Babe the blue ox.</p><p>But only the model of Steinbrenner&rsquo;s suite on display at Populous, not the original version delivered to the Yankees, has George Costanza.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" Populous is offering a tour of its model shop and many of the models on display in its offices, 300 Wyandotte St., Suite 200, at 2 p.m. Sept.