The Cleveland Browns have played professional football on the tempestuous shores of Lake Erie since 1946. The franchise has always insisted on its lunch pail aesthetic: No cheerleaders, no mascot, no logo; just beer, bratwurst with stadium mustardsomething to do on Sunday after church. The teams name itself was straightforwardly derived from Paul Brown, its first head coach. The original Cleveland Municipal Stadium mens rooms had a single huge trough for urine, egalitarian and economical. All of this clashes with todays experience economy in what is now Huntington Bank Field, which includes $18 canned IPAs and pop songs pumped over the loudspeakers between every down. Indeed, the lamentable, unpredictable winter conditions of Lake Eries southern shores challenge the soul. For the fans, those conditions are the stadium, and understanding this is crucial to getting to the bottom of the architectural and cultural failure that is the new domed stadium proposal by HKS Architects.A Cleveland Browns tailgate on game day (Erik Drost/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)Last month the Cleveland Brownss owner Jimmy Haslam, who is personally worth $8.5 billion dollars as of 2024, announced plans to leave Lake Erie for a new domed stadium in nearby suburban Brook Park close to the regional airport, not unlike what the Chicago Bears are doing in Arlington Heights. Haslams proposal entails a $2.4 billion stadium project, split halfway between the team and taxpayers, with an additional $1 billion development next to the stadium itself. This puts the taxpayers on the hook for $1.2 billion, a sum that Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne dismissed as a fantasy. Maybe if ole Jimmy could just pick himself up by his bootstraps, he could afford his own stadium like fellow billionaire (former Microsoft executive) Steve Ballmer, who just enjoyed the opening of the Intuit Dome, the LA Clipperss new arena he paid for in full.Ground view of newly proposed stadium (Courtesy HKS Architects)Certainly, Haslams latest choice to uplift a beloved civic symbol to an airport parking lot is the latest icing on the cake after a long list of decisions he and the team made that left Clevelanders pissed off. From the decision to trade out draft picks for an unprecedented $230 million guaranteed contract to a quarterback who today has more sexual assault settlements than touchdown throws, to getting embarrassed in the playoffs by the team who hosed them in that trade, to now getting stadiumcucked by Steve Ballmer: Its so over. At least in the roaring 1920s, robber barons were competing to see who could create more civic assets, generating morsels of public good here and there. (Just head 10 minutes east of downtown to see Rafael Violys new $350 million addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art that houses an impressively large collection, free and open to the public to this day.) But todays billionaire class seems to have different priorities: The Cleveland Browns are dead, and Jimmy Haslam has killed them.Howd We Get Here?Lake Erie isnt some doggone fishin reservoir you can walk away from, Jimmy: It holds the blood of a decisive American victory over the British Royal Navy in 1812. It has the largest commercial fishing industry of any Great Lake because its the shallowest (with a max depth of 210 feet). Fishing contributes over a billion dollars to Ohios economy alone. Its by far the stormiest of all the Great Lakes by a wide margin, which is partly why Lake Erie is estimated to hold the highest density of shipwrecks in the world. This unsettling fact is well considered while listening to the tale of a nautical mishap told in Gordon Lightfoots Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.Lake Erie frozen over with Clevelands skyline in the background (Erik Drost/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)This is recent history in the life of a lake. Deep below the shipwrecks is the Cleveland Shale, a geologic formation which holds the remnants of Dunkleosteus, a ferocious apex predator who ruled what was a tropical sea some 359 million years ago. The name Erie pays homage to the native peoples who lived on the very southern shores were discussing, formed from the Iroquois term Erielhonan which means long tailed cat. This is in reference to the frenetic weather, a phenomenon that would later be known by scientists as: Lake effect. It occurs when cold air masses move over long expanses of warm water, making the southern shores of Lake Erie one of only a handful of places in the world where this type of weather is felt, in a way that Diller Scofidio + Renfros Blur Building could only dream of.View of Cleveland Municipal Stadium circa 1960s (Author Unknown/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)Cleveland Municipal Stadium came to Lake Erie in 1931, a venue designed by Walker and Weeks, a local firm. That relic stood firm until 2000, when Populous replaced it with Huntington Bank Field. Now, it is widely known that the Browns are a historically bad football teamthey havent won a Super Bowl since the contest was invented in 1967. But it is not widely known that the early Browns were such a dominant team playing in the AAFC between 194649 (winning 92 percent of their games, and all four championships) they caused the entire league to default and be folded into the NFL.The team today is in last place in the AFC North, and their play is awful, abysmal, a disgrace. But sometimes it feels to me like Browns fans are not so much rooting for their team to win as much as they are daring anyone to come to the lakefront and simply play Cleveland football as it was meant to be played. So Long, Lake Erie?The world was treated to exactly that last week on the nationally televised Thursday Night Football game between the Browns and division rival Steelers. An average viewership of 13.72 million watched a relatively lackluster first half turn into an aesthetic masterpiece as a huge accumulation of snow blanketed the stadium. The scene caused an uproar on social media, with national pundits and regular fans alike connected in awe and lamenting a future dome. (And the good guys won!)In terms of the proposals planning merit, the plan by Haslam and HKS is admittedly a sensible option. The large brownfield site of former Ford Engine Plant Number 1 currently sits vacant and demolished just steps away from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, creating an unpleasant welcome to the city and an unlikely candidate for any other type of development. The downtown stadium location being gone would free up the lakefront site for a mixed-use redevelopment, a much more preferable use type than a hulking mass that sits empty 358 days of the year.The new stadium would also host concerts, and other sporting evens like soccer and basketball. (Courtesy HKS Architects)Yet, there are 450 acres of underutilized space right next door in Burke Lakefront Airport, which the City of Cleveland has been trying to close for years, recently paying for and releasing two new studies, proving that it would be best to halt all flights and redevelop. In my opinion, a renovation of the current stadium would be worth it in anticipation of the eventual closure of Burke and placing a new stadium there. The Cleveland airport was the first American airport to offer direct rail travel to a central business district; and the proposed stadium relocation shows upgrades and connections to the first stop on that line. The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authoritys Rapid train was already a widely chosen form of transportation for Browns fans. But the new stadium could show decreased transit use, due to the proposed 14,000 parking spaces and that the station being replaced is the southernmost and westernmost park-and-ride rail station in the network. The proposal itself by global architecture firm HKS is still in early stages, but uniquely the field is sunken below ground level which is clearly a response to the need to dig much of the existing site out for brownfield remediation. This gives the project an opportunity for a low profile above-ground visual language of smaller, angular and occasionally gabled roof structures. The renderings show old growth treeswhich should be illegal for publicly funded projects if it isnt in the budgetlining walkways improbably covered in swaths of adoring fans.The extremely thin and vaguely supported glass roof over the field itself is the most questionable element of the proposal. Im curious how snow load and heat gain will manage the aforementioned lake effect weather, but more so disinterested in the busy lines and disappointing payoff.Parasitic Farce of a New StadiumAll in all, the whole thing lacks any particular identity, which is admittedly hard to do in a stadium, but if the project is located close to or integrated within a city context; that city context helps to do so. Without that context, it just looks like a suburban Walmart in a gaming PC costumeand the inside will have all the bells and whistles of modern NFL game entertainment: 5 seconds of pop music between every down, tickers of the sportsbook over/unders, and all the latest monsters of line-go-up culture. The only safe bet is that all the little mens urinals will each have their own little walls between every little fixture so that absolutely no one thinks you might be gay. The $1 billion development slated to help tie the stadium together with the airport next to it is vaguely planned as mixed-use, likely with some hotels, bars, and what have you. This stitching component is the most worrisome part of the whole proposal. Between the generic design elements and lack of any surrounding context, the whole thing feels completely bottled. A downtown stadium spreads its fans and activities into the city context itself in an egalitarian fashion, whereas this new development will coerce people to spend time and money before or after an event without ever leaving.Interior view of new stadium proposal (Courtesy HKS Architects)The new stadium will just be an extension of common airport space: More fuel for the trad social media influencers who claim that generic architecture is somehow manifesting from societys trends toward socialism over rugged individualism and not the actual culprit: Financed and planned captive environments. The design feels to me like none of the 1,500 employees at HKSs 29 corporate offices around the globe have even been to Cleveland, let alone eaten bratwurst with stadium mustard and a beer in -30 degreesFahrenheit windchill watching the worst team in the league and thinking damn this is the life.Therefore, I propose to retire the Cleveland Browns at the lakefront and if ownership so chooses, let the team move to Brook Park under a new identity. Let the records, history, name, and colors sink down to the festering depths and join the shipwrecks and the sailors and the ancestral peoples and Dunkleosteus fossils and the shale at the bottom of Lake Erielhonan. This seems like a more fitting ending than this vile sapping of a simple pastime now lining the pockets of a greedy letdown like Jimmy Haslam. By leaving the values of kinship and camaraderie aside, and falling head over heels for billionaire worship, Cleveland has betrayed its workaday identity. It deserves this parasitic farce of a new stadium.Ryan Scavnicky is an assistant professor at Marywood University School of Architecture. He is the coordinator of the new Bachelor of Virtual Architecture degree program. He hails from the icy shores of Cleveland.