Barclays Center Progress and Info

[NetscCourtside]

Going to the Nets game at TD Garden tonight, should be fun. Rocking my Deron jersey.

[Teletopez]

Brett Yormark, for whatever reason, decided to take shots at Daniel Goldstein and Norman Oder (arena critics) on Twitter today.

[Teletopez]

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp88E.tmp_tcm20-1642606.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmpB1F.tmp_tcm20-1642615.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmpDDF.tmp_tcm20-1642628.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp10EE.tmp_tcm20-1642641.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp13FC.tmp_tcm20-1642654.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp167D.tmp_tcm20-1642666.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp2344.tmp_tcm20-1642726.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp25C6.tmp_tcm20-1642736.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp2B27.tmp_tcm20-1642761.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp3088.tmp_tcm20-1642787.jpg

http://www.architectmagazine.com/Images/tmp3309.tmp_tcm20-1642798.jpg

 

Despite some early reports likening the Barclays Center to “an angry clam” or “a rusty alligator skull” (The New York Times requested and received dozens of nicknames from readers), Ratner’s gamble has paid off in a decidedly un-fearsome building. Architecturally at least—the jury is still out on local crowding and post-game mayhem—it is a very good neighbor. The sidewalks are partially sheltered and lined with benches and new retail, including a cross-branded flagship for Jay-Z’s Rocawear and a brand standards–busting Starbucks cleverly detailed in repurposed gym flooring. Not very New Brooklyn, perhaps, all that mainstream branding and re-branding. But inside the Barclays Center, the concessions are rich in the precious local fare. And the building is bringing big entertainment (Leonard Cohen! Barbara Streisand! Rush!) and two pro teams (the Islanders recently announced that they would join the Brooklyn Nets there; the arena has the capacity to transform into an ice hockey rink to support them) to a Manhattan-averse populace who would otherwise have to brave a trip to the enduring awfulness of Madison Square Garden.

 

Even the aggrieved neighbors may come to admit in time that this smart new building is better than a big, dumb hole in the ground. And the smartest, most neighborly move of all? The pre-weathered raw-steel exoskeleton that wraps the body of the arena—the feature that had observers reaching for dramatic similes in the first place.

 

It is, at its roots, a deeply functional structure. Not in the usual sense—it doesn’t keep out the rain; it doesn’t hold anything up—but in terms of psychology, experience, and urbanism. The bones of Ellerbe’s arch-roofed stadium, a design derived from its Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, were largely a given when SHoP first got the job: The steel had already been ordered. Ratner, to his credit, recognized that the bland brick exteriors (also harkening back to Indianapolis) wouldn’t fly here; a retail development across Atlantic Avenue had gone the banal route decades earlier and has been loudly detested since. So he asked Childs, and then called SHoP.

 

Over the life of the job, SHoP’s purview came to encompass the whole interior—the building reads and performs as an organic whole—but at first the firm was a little hamstrung by the arrangement. So it made the steel exoskeleton do everything—create a suitable identity for the arena, manage its scale, turn inside as a soffit that gives the major concourses an urbane character and a strict structural meter that really classes up the joint. And then finally (adding new steel that Ellerbe never dreamed of) reaching out away from the mass of the building in a prodigious cantilever, 225 feet wide and 85 feet deep, at the entrance.

Architect Magazine