About
Brian Powers, AIA, LEED AP
As a licensed architect, Brian Powers was always building, designing, or drawing something as far back as he can remember. Those seeds were planted at an early age as Brian explored the many castles and ruins while living abroad as a self-described “Army Brat”. It was a natural choice that Brian chose architecture and entered architecture school at Auburn University.
As part of a sketch assignment while on a college field trip in Chicago, Brian made a side-trip to old Comiskey Park, the former home of the Chicago White Sox. Comiskey Park was entering her 80th and final season in 1990 and Brian was surprised nothing was being done to preserve the legacy of what was then the oldest baseball park in the country. Armed with a sketchbook and camera, he spent the day sketching and photographing the “Baseball Palace of the World”. From that point forward, Brian found ways to creatively bridge his passion for the built environment with the sport he loved as a kid. Preserving these historical venues is Brian’s way to understand the people, neighborhoods, the legacy and the stories of the cities we live in.
While working in Montgomery, Alabama after college, Brian became a charter member of Friends of Rickwood Field when it was formed in 1992. Not wanting Rickwood to suffer the same fate as Comiskey Park, Brian often drove the 180-mile round trip to Birmingham to help with the cleaning and rehabilitation efforts to restore what became the oldest baseball park in the country after Comiskey was demolished a year earlier. Those efforts were later on display in the movies “Cobb” and “42”. in 2024, Rickwood will host regulation Major League Baseball in a tribute game to the Negro Leagues. This showcase event on the national stage would not be possible today without the grassroots efforts by Brian and other ballpark visionaries over 3 decades ago.
Shortly thereafter, Brian accepted a position with Kansas City based HOK Sport (now Populous) where he spent nearly a decade as a project architect and a key contributor to the development of some of baseball’s most prominent ballparks including Pittsburgh’s PNC Park, Chicago’s Wrigley Field, and the transformation of Anaheim (Angel) Stadium.
Since moving to Chicago in 2007, Brian has continued to be a sought-after expert in ballpark history and design. In addition to being cited in books and newspapers, Brian’s work was also showcased in the Sacred Grounds Ballpark Exhibit at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Currently, Brian is partnering with the Baseball Heritage Museum in Cleveland, Ohio to develop an interactive exhibition of League Park. He also led the SmithGroup design team in the rehabilitation of historic Hamtramck Stadium in Hamtramck, Michigan for the centennial anniversary of the Negro Leagues. Brian’s rehabilitation work on Hamtramck was awarded the prestigious Michigan Govenor’s Award from the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) in 2023.
In 2019, Brian formed Bandbox Ballparks to share his specialized research of our sports architectural heritage aiming to tell the stories today so the legacies of sports venues can be enjoyed by generations of tomorrow. His work has been featured in many media outlets around the country including The Chicago Sun Times, AP, The Score, WGN, WLW, WEWS and many others.
Brian is a member of the American Institute of Architects, Society of American Baseball Research and a Life Member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.