Vikes Owners Hint at Retractable Roof for Stadium The Metrodome always felt like a rental property for Zygi and Mark Wilf, two New Jersey real estate developers who purchased the Minnesota Vikings in 2005 with the hopes of moving out of the place as quickly as possible. Now the Wilf brothers will have a home of their own, hopefully by the 2016 season. One day after winning their seven-year fight for a new stadium, the Vikings owners started to lay out their vision for the $975 million project they hope will serve as a recruiting tool for free agents for decades. They appear to be leaning toward footing the bill for a retractable roof, which could help them bring a Major League Soccer franchise to Minnesota. They also see a stadium and plaza with cutting-edge technology and lots of open spaces for fans to congregate. "We're going to try to get the maximum number of features within the budgets that we can make this a facility that is going to be exciting to the fans," Mark Wilf said Friday. We know it's a competitive landscape to attract our fans to the facility and we're going to want to make it something special. To the extent that (a retractable roof) can get there, we're going to try to do it. The Vikings and the NFL are contributing $477 million toward the project, with $348 million coming from the state and $150 million from Minneapolis. If the Wilfs want a retractable roof, they will have to fork over even more money. State lawmakers put a provision in the bill that allows for a retractable roof, but the Vikings would have to pay the extra cost. The price tag of such a feature isn't immediately known because the architects have yet to be hired, but Zygi Wilf has long been keen on the idea of an open-air stadium like his beloved New York Giants had in the Meadowlands when he was younger. "If it's snowing very, very hard, we'll open up the roof," Zygi Wilf quipped. When asked if that meant a roof was definitely in the plans, Wilf backed off, saying he wasn't sure yet. The plans are in their infant stages, with just a few artist renderings shown to the public that could change dramatically over the next eight to 12 months of the design phase. The most recent depiction shows a circular stadium with a huge plaza and green space. The Wilfs visited every new stadium in the league, from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis to new football palaces in New Jersey and Dallas to research ideas for their own venue. "Public spaces to us seem a very exciting place to gather," Mark Wilf said. Whether it's the plaza outside, you hear about the Lucas Oil Stadium, the way they have the large areas where people can gather, wide concourses, clubs. We want to really enhance the ability for people to come together. It will be the first time in the Vikings' 51-year franchise history that they will have a place of their own. They shared Metropolitan Stadium with the Twins for 21 seasons, then shared the Metrodome with the Twins and University of Minnesota football team for most of the past three decades. "We want to get people out of their homes and come to the stadium and enjoy that," Zygi Wilf said. The features that we have there will evolve. As much as we've seen other stadiums, this will be our own. This will be a Minnesota Vikings stadium on its own. It will have its own footprint and own features that will be different from others.