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August 27, 2012
The Appraisal: Constructing a Facade Both Rugged and Rusty
The New York Times
by Elizabeth A. Harris
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After years of building, and even more years of bickering, the arena is almost finished — but this is not immediately obvious to all those who wander by.
“Is it meant to be that way, with the rust?” one woman asked, squinting at the steel.
“I thought they were going to paint it,” said a man who stopped to stare.
No, they are not. For the facade of the Barclays Center, more traditional materials were rejected in favor of 12,000 separate pieces of what is called “weathering steel,” and that leathery brown hue, which is the arena’s final finish, is not paint but an intended layer of rust.
...“When the material gets wet, there is a rusty wash that goes down onto adjacent areas of concrete,” said Michael Devonshire, a materials expert at Jan Hird Pokorny Associates, an architecture firm. “It can get really funky looking.”
...To fend off some of the headaches, the steel on the Barclays Center was weathered before it ever made it to Brooklyn. Gregg Pasquarelli, a principal at SHoP Architects, which designed the arena, said the steel components spent about four months at an Indianapolis plant where they were put through more than a dozen wet-and-dry cycles a day. (Mr. Pasquarelli said the arena looked to him like what would happen if “Richard Serra and Chanel made a U.F.O. together.")
NoLandGrab: Don't flatter yourself, Pasquarelli. More like George Foreman and Fred Sanford made a U.F.O. together.
Photo: Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times
Posted by eric at August 27, 2012 11:09 AM