HOUSTON – (Realty News Report) – New Orleans Architect Brad McWhirter is a partner at Trahan Architects, which was lead architect and managing partner of the team that rebuilt the Superdome with amazing speed following Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in August 2005. Trahan has served as an ongoing steward of the Superdome, handling renovations, the creation of a long-term master plan and a recent $570 million redevelopment prior to hosting the Super Bowl earlier this year.
Trahan also designed the Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame in Natchitoches, a north Louisiana facility that won international and national architecture design awards.
McWhirter was a speaker at the National Association of Real Estate Editors (NAREE) conference in New Orleans in June. He recently took time to sit down with Houston journalist Ralph Bivins of Realty News Report to discuss the 50-year history of the Superdome (circa 1975), the future of Houston’s 60-year-old Astrodome (circa 1965) and why New Orleans rejected the idea of demolishing its stadium, a symbol of the city’s resiliency.
The following is an excerpt from McWhirter’s appearance on The Ralph Bivins Project podcast.
To listen to the entire podcast Click Here for Spotify – or – Click Here for YouTube
RALPH BIVINS: Welcome to The Ralph Bivins Project. And welcome to New Orleans architect Brad McWhirter, a partner at Trahan Architects. Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall Aug. 29, 2005, flooded the Superdome with 4 million gallons of water. The renovation cleanup after the storm required the removal of 4,000 tons of debris. The stadium’s roof, a 10-acre roof, was totally demolished. You’re a New Orleans native with an architecture degree from LSU. Your city is devastated by a storm that killed 1,800 people and left catastrophic damage. And you’re facing a huge challenge: rebuilding a landmark structure that means a lot to the citizens and the tourism economy of New Orleans.
BRAD McWHIRTER: That was quite a time. I won’t ever forget leading up to that August date in 2005. Up until that point I had just been a New Orleans native who went to every Saints game in the building my entire life. I’ll just never forget that Friday before Katrina hit, the Saints had a preseason football game against the Baltimore Ravens. As we were leaving the stadium, just as a normal game event, all the TVs showed this hurricane popping up in the Gulf. I would have never in my wildest dreams imagined that would happen to the city and to the stadium. It started our 20-year relationship professionally with the building that I had grown up admiring so much.
We rolled our sleeves up and got to work.
The first question was – could it be salvaged … and was it worth it? There was a lot of backing. Political backing. National Football League backing.
Houston became kind of the practice field. I remember the Saints were practicing in the Astrodome’s parking lot that season afterwards. There’s just so many ties between Houston and New Orleans. It dates back to the conception. The original Superdome design was conceived of as a design to improve upon and be better than the Astrodome, which opened 10 years before the Superdome. There’s a real connection to the two buildings.
After Katrina, we worked for a really quick nine months and implemented about $200 million of work to just – we like to refer to it as – just get the butts back in the seats. Get to a point where we could host a game. We’re not worried if the paint’s not all dry yet and the millwork is finished. We just need New Orleans’ living room back. We want the people to be able to come, we want the team to be able to play, and we want to get back to some sense of normalcy… Get us to the bare minimum. I think we exceeded the bare minimum as you saw in that original game in September of 2006 of coming back to the Super Dome. It exceeded everybody’s expectations for sure.
RALPH BIVINS: It was such a celebration for the city. It was a highly emotional game – often called “The Rebirth Game” – with the Saints defeating the Atlanta Falcons 23-3. It was barely a year since the hurricane hit and you’re able to do all this and host Monday Night Football. Complete $200 million of work to the stadium – and back then, $200 million was a lot of money.
“Should it be torn down? Should it be built in a different spot?
BRAD McWHIRTER: There were all these other studies. Should it be torn down? Should a new stadium be built somewhere in a different spot? All those things were surrounding the decision-making process when we decided to move forward. The building was 30 years old at that time. So that’s an old stadium in NFL standards. What was the Astrodome when NRG Stadium (Reliant Stadium at the time), what was its age when the decision was to build that new stadium right next to it? (The Astrodome was 35 years old when construction started on the adjacent NRG Stadium.) And now, in Houston, they’re even considering something else potentially beside so you’ll end up with NRG and the Astrodome. It’s a real testament to the leadership of Louisiana in identifying the Superdome as something that’s more than just a stadium. I think it’s got this culture to it, it’s iconic image. We talk about kind of turning tragedy into triumph. It was such a tragic event – Katrina. We very quickly turned it into this symbol of rebirth and rebuild. There’s been lots of polls done and studies done on the interest. What if we got rid of it and got something new? There’s not an appetite for it here. I think that speaks to the longevity of it and why the decision keeps being made to continue to progress it. We just transformed it with a $570 million transformation.
RALPH BIVINS: $570 million is a lot of money.
BRAD McWHIRTER: It is. When you do projects like that, we just did a portion of the ideas and the concepts that were created for it. You know, there was a master plan of much larger ideas and concepts. It’s a state-owned building. The state has a lot of events. We like to say that it’s much more than a sports or an NFL stadium.
“It’s a real testament to the leadership of Louisiana in identifying the Superdome as something that’s more than just a stadium.”
RALPH BIVINS: We had kind of gotten used to hearing it called Mercedes Benz Superdome and then when this last Super Bowl came around, Caesars the casino company which has a casino there on Canal Street, it’s now it’s named the Caesars Superdome. I believe you added some space in there and made other improvements. Tell us about this recent modernization that got it ready for the 59th Annual Super Bowl that was played in February of this year?
BRAD McWHIRTER: The big move with this new transformation of the Superdome that was just completed – it was a five-year, phased project where we kept the building open during construction, as crazy as it sounds, but you know maintained all the major events – we called it kind of a Rubik’s Cube of phasing. With this redevelopment we really elevated the general admission patron experience of how you come into the building, work your way through vertically the building into the different seat areas as kind of an efficiency, an improvement of speed. Which then started to open massive amounts of new lounges, club spaces, food and beverage offerings. The Superdome is a 2 million SF building There was a lot of adaptive re-use.
RALPH BIVINS: What are your thoughts about the Astrodome?
BRAD McWHIRTER: When you have a building like the Astrodome… you’re dealing with adaptive re-use in that instance because the main tenant is no longer utilizing it. To pull it off, you need a champion, a stakeholder. Those tend to drive the design ideas and what it could be. It needs to have the backing of those stakeholders. It needs the backing of the community and a major tenant to be successful and have legs.
RALPH BIVINS: You talk about building several small scale components under the dome’s. That idea has been unfolded across the nation with a lot of projects. Is that correct?
BRAD McWHIRTER: It has. And especially in buildings that are on the Historic Register. They are protected and so it becomes a question of adaptive reuse. It’s never going to be a 65,000-seat NFL or MLB stadium again. It won’t ever be that. So, what could it be? Those types of things happen not just around nationally but internationally as well. Think of all the buildings that get built for the Olympics and how they have to get repurposed. There’s just not a need for those scale of structures and stadiums after the Olympics use. That’s always something that’s being contemplated.
RALPH BIVINS: You’ve done some other sports related facilities. Tell us a little bit about those.
BRAD McWHIRTER: Years ago, prior to the Superdome work, we were doing collegiate football stadiums and sports work. We’ve done a couple of expansions of LSU’s Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. We’ve also did a ground-up LSU softball complex which is considered one of the greatest softball stadiums in the NCAA. It was built along the Mississippi River. We actually bermed the site up and built into the land because of its proximity to the river.
To listen to the entire podcast Click Here for Spotify – or – Click Here for YouTube
Bonus In-Depth Focus: How the recent redevelopment of the Caesars Superdome uncovered massive amounts of new interior space for lounges and food & beverage service.
BRAD McWHIRTER: The big piece that kind unlocked this new transformation was, when you have buildings the age of the Superdome which is now 50 years old, many of the original design standards are much, much different these days. And so it had hundreds of thousands of square feet of existing ramps, exit ramps inside the building that were outdated and take up a lot of space. Way more space than current egress standards and life safety systems allowed in stadium construction today. So, there are eight of these massive ramps inside the existing envelope of the Superdome. Two on each end zone and two on each side line. As part of the master plan, we identified removal of all of the ramps internal to the Superdome. in the project, we only removed four of the eight ramps and the four ramp systems were removed from the sidelines and replaced with egress stairs, and new smoke, exhaust, and stair pressurization systems that shrunk the footprint of those egress systems from hundreds of thousands of square feet to exponentially smaller, just scissor stairs essentially. And that unlocked the ability to reshuffle and rework the way that the building and people circulate through. So, we created all new entrances, all new lobbies, we created all new we call them atrium spaces in three of the four corners.
To listen to the entire podcast Click Here for Spotify – or – Click Here for YouTube
July 7, 2025 Realty News Report Copyright 2025
THE RALPH BIVINS PROJECT PODCAST
LISTEN: THE RALPH BIVINS PROJECT with Brad McWhirter of Trahan Architects
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LISTEN: THE RALPH BIVINS PROJECT with Danny Rice of Colliers
LISTEN: THE RALPH BIVINS PROJECT with Trey Odom of Avera
LISTEN: THE RALPH BIVINS PROJECT with Kris Larson of Downtown Houston +
LISTEN: THE RALPH BIVINS PROJECT with Jim Carman of Howard Hughes Holdings
LISTEN: THE RALPH BIVINS PROJECT with Sam Scott of CommGate
File: The Ralph Bivins Project: Podcast Guest Brad McWhirter New Orleans The Ralph Bivins Project: Podcast Guest Brad McWhirter Caesars, Hurricane Katrina