Commanders Stadium at RFK Campus

The Commanders Stadium at RFK Campus returns the Washington Commanders to the ground the franchise called home from 1961 to 1996, at 2400 East Capitol Street SE, set to finish in 2030.

Designed by lead architect HKS, the 1.8-million-square-foot venue seats 65,000 under a sculpted transparent roof, and is wrapped by a continuous colonnade whose columns read as modern but carry echoes of classical ornamentation. The roof is kept deliberately low along the east-west axis in deference to the U.S. Capitol, and the building sits on an elevated podium that gives it a civic presence within Pierre L'Enfant's plan for the city. Inside, the seating bowl rises in one unbroken sweep from field level to the upper deck, with no stacked premium levels and minimal overhangs, a configuration drawn from the old RFK Stadium and tuned to hold crowd noise inside the building and push it back toward the field. A Clark Construction Group, Mortenson and Smoot Construction joint venture is building it. The stadium anchors a far larger transformation of the RFK campus into a mixed-use district of housing, parks, recreation and public space along the Anacostia River. The Commanders have committed at least $2.7 billion to the venue itself, with the stadium and its surrounding development together projected among the most expensive ever built in the United States.