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September 26, 2012
Brooklyn’s Barclays Center: First visit to the “brutalist dog turd”
Field of Schemes
by Neil deMause
I paid my first up-close-and-personal visit to the Brooklyn Nets‘ Barclays Center on Monday, and … well, suffice to say that the giant Barclays logo on the roof is the least remarkable element of the place (click on photos to enlarge):
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 It’s very brown. Or browns. |
 The roof of the subway entrance is covered with environmentally friendly sod seeded with plants. Which is already peeling off. |
Other than that, the main impression I came away with was “Man, that’s a lot of brown.” It definitely makes a major architectural statement; whether it’s the kind of statement the neighbors will ever grow to love is an open question, and probably one that will depend less on architecture than on whether arenagoers take the train as hoped, or insist on driving around in circles for an hour looking for parking. I expect that large numbers of Jay-Z attendees this weekend will be able to handle public transit; when the Barbra Streisand fans descend after that, though, watch out.
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It’s the exceedingly strange $1 billion Barclays Center opening on Sept. 28. Rapper Jay-Z leads off with eight sold-out shows in the 19,000-seat concert hall.
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As we've been saying...
Designed to favor basketball, Barclays wraps faceted seating tiers tightly around the court. That means the arena can’t accommodate the longer playing surface of professional hockey, said Stephen J. Duethman, the Kansas City-based managing principal of AECOM, on a walk-through.
NoLandGrab: That's interesting. The arena does have a regulation-sized rink, but the seating configuration for hockey is awful. But Bruce Ratner, Brett Yormark and company have repeatedly claimed they're trying to lure the Islanders — who were scheduled to play an exhibition game there on October 2nd before the NHL locked out its players — to the Barclays Center come 2015. Ain't gonna happen.
Brownstoner, Architecture Critics Turn Eye Toward Barclays
Posted by eric at September 26, 2012 12:20 PM