Park And Play

"Underhill Field, a carpet-style synthetic turf surface located on top of a two-story parking garage that was backed into a hill in the heart of campus, was a popular recreation facility at the University of California, Berkeley. Hemmed in by dorms on two sides, a dining hall on the third and busy College Avenue where the rooftop met the hilltop, the field was the site of intramurals and club-team practices, with soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and rugby balls whizzing into 25-foot-tall nets and clanking against a perimeter chain-link fence.

The 1989 Bay Area earthquake changed all that. Found to be slightly damaged and seismically unsafe in the event of a future temblor, the structure was demolished in 1993, and the lot stayed vacant until this past fall, when Underhill Field reopened on top of a new, seismically safe, four-story parking structure.

The new field is, like the old one, not of regulation size. Measuring 106 by 81 yards, it's lined for various sports and, unlike the old field, is an infill system that represents today's state of the art in synthetic turf manufacture. There have been a number of other improvements - there's an offset area for a small number of spectators, rest rooms, an athletic equipment storage room and a sidewalk plaza. But the surface is the aspect of the project that most sets it apart from the former field - it's sumptuous where the other was utilitarian; it gives the field primacy where it once seemed more of an afterthought to solving the on-campus parking problem. It also is designed to provide better drainage than fields of the past - a huge consideration when placing a playing surface up on the roof.

Rooftop playing surfaces are most often born of necessity, dictated by a tight site that prevents the side-by-side accommodation of both a field and a structure. A number of such projects pair sports surfaces with a parking structure; in some cases, the parking structure sits completely below ground, with the "rooftop" field located essentially on grade. In yet another permutation, the building site is sloped (as with Underhill Field), and the playing surface is placed partly on grade and partly on the structure's top."