History
The Houston NFL Holdings group came to Populous (then HOK Sport) to begin the schematic design for the first-ever NFL retractable roof football stadium in 1997. The intention was to create a football stadium to replace the Astrodome that would operate like an open-air facility but have the intimacy and comfort of an indoor arena. With the design for football and the square footage requirements of the rodeo, the building was designed in the 1,900,000-square-foot (180,000 m2) range. Groundbreaking for the stadium was on March 9, 2000 and the building was officially topped off in October 2001. The stadium opened on August 24, 2002, with a preseason game between the Miami Dolphins and Houston Texans which the Dolphins won 24-3. The stadium hosted its first regular season NFL football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Houston Texans on September 8, 2002. Construction was completed in 30 months. The first rodeo was held in the stadium in February 2003.
During a Texans preseason game on August 31, 2012, an intoxicated fan fell to his death from an escalator.
Read more about this topic: Reliant Stadium
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)