Astrodome

FACTSFact sheet

01A stadium against the weather

Roy Hofheinz had already been Harris County judge and mayor of Houston when, in the late 1950s, he thought of covering a shopping center with a dome. According to his biographer Edgar W. Ray, cited in the National Register nomination, he consulted Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, who told him any space could be covered as long as the money did not run out. In 1960, when the chance came to bring major league baseball to Houston, the shopping center left the stage and the dome went to the stadium.

The argument was the climate. Houston has heat, humidity and summer storms, and the Houston Sports Association and the county commissioners believed an open-air stadium would not draw crowds. But a covered, air-conditioned stadium was such a new idea that revenue bonds would not attract investors. Harris County turned to tax-backed bonds, approved by voters in January 1961 and December 1962. The National League granted the team, the Colt .45s, which debuted in 1962 in a temporary stadium next to the site of the future dome.

02Steel diamonds

No span of that size had ever been roofed. The designers compared cantilevered trusses, a timber space frame and Fuller's geodesic dome, and settled on a lamella dome: a network of identical steel members arranged in diamonds, like a weave. The system, born in timber in Germany in 1918, had already worked on spans of up to 285 feet, about 87 meters. In Houston it would be 642 feet, 195.7 meters.

The dome was divided into 12 sectors of 30 degrees, with every member the same depth, 1.5 meters. It rests on a steel tension ring that runs around the stadium on top of 72 columns, and those columns were made to move: steel grows in the heat and shrinks in the cold, and the columns move with it without straining the structure below. Under the design wind, the dome could shift about 14 centimeters to each side. A model was tested in a wind tunnel at the McDonnell aircraft plant in St. Louis, under 48 different wind conditions. According to the National Register nomination, everything was calculated without computer models.

03Assembled in the air

The groundbreaking ceremony, on January 3, 1962, had county and team officials firing Colt .45 revolvers into the ground instead of digging with shovels. Construction of the stadium itself began on March 18, 1963, under the Houston contractor H. A. Lott, with steel from American Bridge. The dome was assembled on 37 temporary shoring towers; the longest members were 122 feet, about 37 meters.

According to historian Kenneth Womack, in a book from the Society for American Baseball Research, Hurricane Cindy passed through the region in September 1963 without damaging the structure; the tension ring was closed in December; ten defective welds were found by radiography and redone; and in February 1964 the dome was released from the towers and began to stand on its own. In April the 4,596 acrylic skylights began to go in.

How many men worked there, the sources consulted do not record. The Houston Chronicle recorded three deaths: Leon Homer Wilson, in October 1963, and, in 1964, Frank Halliburton, who fell in April, and welder Homer P. Williams, who fell in May.

04The fear of indoor rain

Enclosing 41 million cubic feet of air, more than 1 million cubic meters, under a roof raised a problem no stadium had ever had. Engineer Israel A. Naman, in charge of the air conditioning, wrote in 1966 in the journal of the American society of heating and air-conditioning engineers that there were reports of rain inside large airship hangars while it was dry outside. There was speculation that the stadium might have fog, clouds, turbulence or even rain. The fear was real, but none of the sources records rain inside.

What worried him more was cigarette smoke. Naman built a glass box with engineers inside, facing a color film of a baseball game, and kept filling the box with smoke until they could no longer see the game. From that measurement came the airflow: about 2 to 2.5 million cubic feet per minute, depending on the source, passing through electrostatic filters and activated carbon. The same airflow solved the rest. According to the Houston Public Library, when the system was not kept running all the time, condensation made the interior hazy. Naman concluded that, with the system always on, winter and summer, there would be no haze, cloud or rain.

05The sun in the roof

The Astrodome opened on April 9, 1965, with an exhibition game between the Astros and the New York Yankees. The skylights had been designed to let in enough light for the natural grass, a variety developed especially for the stadium. But in day games the glare of the acrylic behind the ball blinded the players, who lost fly balls in the roof.

Starting on April 21, 1965, the skylights were painted. According to the Houston Public Library, the paint cut between 25% and 40% of the natural light. The glare ended, but the grass began to die within weeks; it was painted green and, by the end of the season, the team was playing on painted dirt. The way out came from Monsanto, which since 1964 had a synthetic turf, ChemGrass, installed at a school in Providence, Rhode Island. In April 1966 it covered the Astrodome's infield and, on July 19, the whole field. The product came to be called AstroTurf, and the name became a byword for artificial turf.

06From shelter to shuttered building

For three decades the Astrodome hosted everything: Muhammad Ali in 1966, college basketball's "Game of the Century" in 1968, the "Battle of the Sexes" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973, the 1992 Republican National Convention. The Oilers left after 1996 and the Astros played there for the last time on October 9, 1999. In September 2005 the stadium sheltered Hurricane Katrina survivors brought by bus from New Orleans: 17,500 at the peak, according to the Houston Public Library, or about 25,000, according to other counts.

In 2008, without a certificate of occupancy and with deficiencies in its fire-protection systems, the building stopped hosting events. In 2013 voters rejected, by 53.5% to 46.5%, $217 million in bonds to turn it into an event center. The following year it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and, in 2017, became a Texas historic landmark. A $105 million county plan, which would have raised the floor and created parking underneath, was suspended in 2019 by the county judge, Lina Hidalgo.

07The bill, 60 years later

In December 2025 the county released a study by Kirksey Architecture, commissioned by the corporation that manages the sports complex: $752.6 million to bring the Astrodome back to basic operation, with plumbing, climate control and safe occupancy conditions, without a full restoration and without capacity for major sporting events; or $55 million to demolish it. The interim county administrator, Jesse Dickerman, said there is no way to renovate it without significant private investment.

In April 2026, close to its 61st anniversary, the National Park Service found that the building meets the criteria to be a National Historic Landmark, the highest historic designation in the United States; in October 2026 the process still depended on a formal nomination and on the Secretary of the Interior. In August the Astrodome Conservancy issued a public call for ideas to investors and operators. The dome that withstood the wind tunnel and the hurricane is still standing; the first item on the bill for reopening it is, once again, the air.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  The dome was so big that it rained inside the stadium.

  What the record shows

  None of the sources records rain inside. The fear existed: the air-conditioning engineer, Israel A. Naman, wrote in 1966 that there had been speculation about fog, clouds and even rain, because of reports from airship hangars. What was recorded was condensation and haze when the air conditioning was turned off. Kept on all the time, the problem did not appear.

• What people say

  A mathematically calculated exhaust system kept the clouds away.

  What the record shows

  What was calculated was the air circulation of the climate-control system, sized in an experiment with cigarette smoke: engineers in a glass box, facing a baseball film, until the smoke hid the game. The same airflow, with filters and activated carbon, took care of the heat, the smoke and the haze.

• What people say

  Artificial turf was invented for the Astrodome.

  What the record shows

  Monsanto had already installed its ChemGrass in 1964, at a school in Providence, Rhode Island. The Astrodome was the first major stadium to use it, in 1966, and the product took its name: AstroTurf.

• What people say

  It was the world's first covered stadium.

  What the record shows

  Covered arenas already existed. The National Register nomination calls it the first enclosed, air-conditioned stadium in the United States, and the Texas State Historical Association calls it the world's first fully air-conditioned, enclosed multipurpose sports stadium. For baseball and football, it was the first.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

Next episode · Structure 27 · premieres Apr 08, 2027

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Olympic Park, Munich, Bavaria, Germany · 1969–1972

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SOURCESSources

1. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, "The Astrodome", Texas Historical Commission, 2013 — thc.texas.gov
2. Wayne Chandler, "Astrodome", Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association — tshaonline.org
3. Kenneth Womack, "Houston Astrodome: Engineering the Eighth Wonder of the World", Society for American Baseball Research, 2017 — sabr.org
4. Robert Trumpbour, "Astrodome (Houston, TX)", SABR BioProject — sabr.org
5. Mark Armour, "The Rise and Fall of Artificial Turf", Society for American Baseball Research — sabr.org
6. Narendra K. Gosain, "Houston Astrodome, The Eighth Wonder of the World", Structure Magazine, 2023 — structuremag.org
7. Houston Public Library, Astrodome Memories, "Construction challenges" — astrodomememories.org
8. Houston Public Library, Astrodome Memories, "Showtime! April 9, 1965" — astrodomememories.org
9. Houston Public Library, Astrodome Memories, "Housing Katrina's evacuees" — astrodomememories.org
10. I. A. Naman, "Domed Stadium Air-Conditioning Design", ASHRAE Journal, 1966, cited by Dan Singer, "The Astrodome's Heavy Weather Problem", Swamplot, 12 February 2019 — swamplot.com
11. Historic American Engineering Record, "Houston Astrodome", HAER TX-108, Library of Congress — loc.gov
12. Houston Chronicle, "This week 55 years ago construction started on the Astrodome", 2018 — chron.com
13. ABC13 Houston, "New study shows demolishing the Astrodome would cost $55 million, while renovating it would cost more than $750 million", 23 December 2025 — abc13.com
14. The Real Deal, "Houston Astrodome math gets starker: $753M to revive, $55M to raze", 23 December 2025 — therealdeal.com
15. Click2Houston, "61 years later, Houston's Astrodome may get top historic honor in the U.S.", 8 April 2026 — click2houston.com
16. Bisnow, "Astrodome Conservancy Solicits Redevelopment Ideas", 18 August 2026 — bisnow.com
17. CultureMap Houston, "Houston group seeks fresh ideas for the Astrodome — including a data center", 19 August 2026 — houston.culturemap.com
18. ABC13 Houston, "Voters strike down proposal to save Astrodome", 2013 — abc13.com
19. National Trust for Historic Preservation, "The Astrodome: Updates" — savingplaces.org
20. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, consumer price index (CPI-U), annual averages for 1965 and 2025 — bls.gov
21. Wikipedia, "Astrodome" (starting point) — en.wikipedia.org

Images

• Fig. 01 — The Astrodome seen from above around 1999, surrounded by the sports complex's parking lot in southwest Houston: Carol M. Highsmith (Library of Congress) · Public domain
• Fig. 02 — The stadium in the 1970s, before the 1988 and 1989 expansions: Drug Enforcement Administration (National Archives) · Public domain
• Fig. 03 — The lamella truss seen from inside in 2004, with the skylights painted over since 1965 to end the glare: Jet Lowe (Historic American Engineering Record) · Public domain
• Fig. 04 — Hurricane Katrina survivors look for relatives at the entrance to the Astrodome on September 1, 2005: Andrea Booher (FEMA) · Public domain
• Fig. 05 — The shuttered Astrodome in January 2014, the month it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places: EricEnfermero · CC BY-SA 3.0