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September 20, 2012
Success of Brooklyn's Barclays Center Will Be in the Eye of the Be-Hova
As the controversial arena nears completion, a SHoP-designed weathered steel facade—and the involvement of the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z—will influence its success.
Architectural Record
by Fred A. Bernstein
New York City felt “baited-and-switched,” says Gregg Pasquarelli, the principal of SHoP Architects, explaining how his firm came to design Barclays Center, the 675,000-square-foot arena in Brooklyn, home to the Brooklyn (formerly New Jersey) Nets. The arena will open with a Jay-Z (aka Hova) concert on September 28. The bait-and-switch occurred when Bruce Ratner, the developer of the arena, dangled a design by Frank Gehry, helping him win city approval for the project, then dropped Gehry after the financial meltdown of 2008. By spring of 2009, Ratner found himself with no design for the building, and a looming deadline: a tax law change that would have cost him hundreds of millions of dollars if the building wasn’t “in the ground” by the end of the year.
...The SHoP partners envisioned a weathered steel façade that Pasquarelli describes as “snakeskin designed by Richard Serra and Coco Chanel,” which would cover the arena and a large oculus that projected out over the triangular plaza in the front of the building, like a giant, pierced tongue.
Posted by eric at September 20, 2012 11:01 AM