From a glass-enclosed box near the 474-foot-long electronic scoreboard, Kubla Khan surveys his stately pleasure dome, talking about $37 million worth of detail in a kind of Texas "poor boy" lingo. Only the scene isn't Xanadu, it is Houston, and Kubla himself is actually Judge Roy Hofheinz, prime mover and dreamer of the domed-stadium dream. He is looking out into the Houston Astrodome, a structure 710 feet in diameter which may very well make obsolete all other stadiums in the world.
This week, on Friday evening, April 9, the Astrodome will open officially, with one of the most unusual baseball weekends ever scheduled: five exhibition games between the Houston Astros and two teams of visitors, the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles. The program is designed to measure up to the Astros' new home, the first and largest self-enclosed, completely air-conditioned sports arena ever created.
For weeks now, in spring training camps, in architectural and technical circles and at Texas cocktail parties, the Astrodome has been the common topic. This mammoth structure shimmers whitely over nine and a half acres of Texas flatland, a prophecy come true. Back in 1939, air-conditioning pioneer Willis Carrier said the day would come when men would live under domes of transparent material, ruling out weather as a factor in work and play. Roy Hofheinz believed in that prediction.
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