Why Barclays Center matters.
Barclays Center is a commanding sports and entertainment arena where Prospect Heights' major transit crossroads meets weathered-steel architecture, professional basketball and a dense calendar of concerts and cultural events.
Set at the convergence of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues near 4th Avenue and just steps from Atlantic Terminal, the arena occupies a sharply angled urban parcel where several Brooklyn street grids and regional transportation routes converge. SHoP Architects wrapped the 675,000-square-foot building in three interwoven bands formed from 12,000 individually shaped weathered-steel panels, giving the enormous enclosure a finely subdivided exterior whose rust-toned surfaces reference the scale and coloration of nearby brownstone blocks. The main entrance rises beneath an 80-foot cantilevered canopy suspended 30 feet above the plaza, with an irregular opening cut through its center and a 3,000-square-foot digital display integrated into the structure. Ground-level glazing opens sections of the perimeter toward surrounding streets, carrying pedestrian activity directly against an arena designed for 17,553 basketball seats and as many as 19,000 seats for concerts. The result is a massive arena shaped with unusual exterior precision, where layered steel, transparent lower elevations, the projecting entrance canopy and a compact urban footprint place a major sports building directly against Brooklyn's street life.
What defines Barclays Center.
Barclays Center is best known for bringing a major professional sports franchise back to Brooklyn through a development campaign that passed through multiple architects, ownership arrangements and design revisions before opening in 2012. Developer Bruce Ratner acquired the New Jersey Nets in 2004 as plans advanced for a Brooklyn arena within the larger Atlantic Yards project. Frank Gehry originally developed the architecture and master plan, but Forest City Ratner removed Gehry from the arena project in 2009 amid financial pressure and years of delays. Ellerbe Becket then developed a replacement arena scheme, with Thornton Tomasetti remaining as structural engineer and WSP Flack + Kurtz continuing on building systems. SHoP Architects joined later in 2009 under an exceptionally compressed schedule, receiving seven weeks to detail and price a major redesign without altering the fundamental arena program already established by Ellerbe Becket. AECOM became architect of record after acquiring Ellerbe Becket, Hunt Construction Group served as design-builder and the completed project carried a stated cost of $675 million. The NBA Board of Governors unanimously approved the Nets' relocation in April 2012, clearing the franchise to begin the 2012-13 season in Brooklyn. Forest City Ratner unveiled the completed building on September 21, 2012 with Bruce Ratner, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz participating in the ceremony. Jay-Z opened the arena to the public on September 28 with the first of eight sold-out concerts, preceding the Nets' first season under the Brooklyn name.
Digital fabrication and later environmental work gave the building a separate technical chapter after SHoP entered the project. The architecture team used CATIA three-dimensional modeling software to specify thousands of distinct exterior components, then helped create an Indianapolis facility where the pieces were fabricated and pre-weathered before shipment to Brooklyn. A custom iPhone application tracked components from fabrication through installation, extending the architects' control across the production chain. The completed venue also became the first arena worldwide to deploy Cisco StadiumVision mobile multicast streaming technology, enabling live video and instant replays on mobile devices inside the building. Its first full year brought Pollstar's Best New Major Concert Venue honor, the 2013 Sports Business Awards Facility of the Year distinction and an Architizer A+ Building of the Year award; Pollstar subsequently named it 2013 Arena of the Year. A major roof project followed, with 135,000 square feet of vegetation installed by 2016 to reduce stormwater runoff and reflected heat. These successive developments joined computational fabrication, arena technology, environmental intervention and major industry recognition within the first four years of the building's operation.
How Barclays Center fits.
Barclays Center works as the anchor for a Brooklyn outing connecting Revolutionary history, nineteenth-century cultural institution-building and the borough's long tradition of experimental performance.
Begin at Old Stone House, a reconstruction of the Vechte-Cortelyou farmhouse commissioned by Hendrick Claessen Vechte in 1699 beside the former Gowanus Creek. The site became a crucial point during the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, when General William Alexander, Lord Stirling, led 400 Maryland troops against 2,000 British forces commanded by General Charles Cornwallis as George Washington's army faced encirclement. The Maryland soldiers repeatedly attacked around the house, sustaining severe losses while other American forces withdrew toward Brooklyn Heights; British forces subsequently occupied Brooklyn and Manhattan for seven years. The present building incorporates stones recovered from the original site and recreates Dutch architectural elements associated with the seventeenth-century farmhouse. Continue to Brooklyn Museum, whose institutional ancestry passes through the Brooklyn Institute and its 1890 reorganization as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Mayor Charles A. Schieren laid the cornerstone for a vast McKim, Mead & White museum in 1895, and the first section opened in 1897. Daniel Chester French directed a program of 30 allegorical facade sculptures added in 1909, and the museum developed an unusually consequential collecting and exhibition history: Charles Edwin Wilbour's Egyptian holdings began entering the collection in 1916, Stewart Culin organized the 1923 exhibition Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo with more than 1,500 African objects, and construction stopped in 1927 with only one-fifth of McKim, Mead & White's intended complex completed. Conclude at Brooklyn Academy of Music, whose first Montague Street building opened in 1861 after the Brooklyn Philharmonic Society proposed a cultural center devoted to music, literature and the arts. Leopold Eidlitz designed that original building, which hosted Edwin Booth's Hamlet, anti-slavery lectures, Mark Twain and celebrations surrounding the Brooklyn Bridge before fire destroyed it in 1903. BAM rebuilt around Lafayette Avenue, later expanding into multiple performance buildings and becoming a major center for theater, dance, music, film and international artistic production. Its main building hosted Franklin D. Roosevelt and Rudolf Nureyev's 1962 American debut, and Hugh Hardy converted its former ballroom into a multipurpose performance setting in 1997. The progression moves from a surviving site of the Battle of Brooklyn through McKim, Mead & White's ambitious museum project and culminates in BAM's evolution across more than a century of performance, connecting military history, collecting and artistic production around Central Brooklyn.
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