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Standing on Barclays Center’s green roof. Photo by Chris Ryan for The Architect’s Newspaper

It must have been a disappointment to many architecture enthusiasts when they discovered that the plan to build a green roof for Barclays Center had been nixed for budgetary reasons. The roof had been part of the original Frank Gehry design — along with a running track around its perimeter — but those features were scrapped during the recession.

The resulting white top, with its big blue logo, gave the stadium a feeling of being somehow unfinished. Now, three years after the grand opening of Barclays Center, the green roof is back in play — and it looks as if all the greenery may be in place by the end of July. Fingers crossed.

The 135,000-square-foot area is in the process of being covered with a layer of sedum, a genus of flowering plants that store water in their leaves. The idea is to capture rainwater, reduce noise output, and provide a more pleasing view for both passers-by and future residents of the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park highrises being built around it.

The Architect’s Newspaper recently got an exclusive tour of the roof in construction, and the photos give the otherworldly impression of a park floating above the streets of Brooklyn.

The green roof plan was raised from the dead thanks to a joint venture between Forest City Ratner and Greenland Holdings Group, a real estate development company out of Shanghai. A new roof structure had to be built on the existing roof to support the sedum, which is shipped in from Connecticut and hoisted onto the roof by crane.

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Closeup of sedum on the roof of Barclays Center. Photo by Chris Ryan for The Architect’s Newspaper

In our last update about the green roof, the deputy director of construction for Forest City Ratner estimated that the roof would be completed by the fall. The installation of the sedum, however, is moving fast. On June 23, Pacific Park Brooklyn tweeted, “Only have 50,000 trays of a total of 135,000 trays of sedum left to deliver!” And in the webcam picture below, you can see that the roof — from this angle anyway — is mostly covered. The remaining architectural and engineering work is due to wrap up by September.

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Barclays Center green roof, as of June 30. Photo via Atlantic Yards webcam

 

 

Norman Oder of watchdog blog Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report points out that the construction was originally scheduled to be completed by July. The crane on Atlantic Avenue that has been there since October of last year was supposed to be gone by May. Will it be gone by the end of July?

 

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Barclays Center in transition. Photo via Atlantic Yards webcam

In the meantime, it’s nice to see how the green of the roof, finally echoing the green roof of the adjacent subway entrance, makes the brown of the stadium’s weathering Cor-Ten steel look less like a rusting oil tanker and more like the colors of a Pacific Northwest rain forest.

 


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. Note, the AY development project’s influence (in terms of driving development) is felt beyond Prospect Heights/Western Crown heights as well. Again, this isn’t to say that development would’ve been at a standstill if not for AY, but I think that you far sell short the impact that the project has had on development. I’ve lived the impact/influence/results for the last 16 years. Neighbors of mine (one guy owned a catering hall on Dean) who were dead set against selling their businesses received dramatic jumps offers for their property (and the offers that made a difference only came through once it became pretty clear that, lawsuits aside, the project was happening) only after it became clear that AY was going to happen. The aggressive mega-project interest in the area only happened once it became clear that a project like AY was a go. I don’t think this is coincidental; AY served as an important catalyst, certainly for the immediate area to the east (I mean, there’s not much that could be done in Park Slope, etc., due to landmarks, etc.).

  2. “You do realize that there has been a real estate explosion in Brooklyn for over 10 years, and that this is not due to AY, right?”
    .
    No, much of what is going on in the Prospect Heights/Western Crown Heights area is directly tied to the AY project. I don’t doubt that development would’ve continued, but not at the rate that is is happening. This project is a huge selling point for both developers and people seeking to move here alike. I am confident that the change that would have occurred. And, note, that type of language fails to acknowledge that the bulk of the development is WITHIN THE PROJECT FOOTPRINT itself, for which there were no credible plans to develop other than what FCR put forward; based on that point alone, I and others feel comfortable stating what we do. True, you had some people/orgs bring up counter-proposals to try to stop FCR, but I doubt the seriousness/viability of those plans and question where those groups were before FCR came along with its vision for a long-neglected area.

  3. No need to suggest anything. I think it was pretty evident to all those in the area with an eye toward objectivity that the overwhelming majority of the AY project was a dump for years before the project was announced. In that sense, the AY project is a godsend. I was tired of looking into the rail yard (still am, but that’ll be filled in soon enough) and having to walk down shady blocks of Atlantic/Pacific that were filled with excrement, condoms, needles, etc. I was tired of walking by such an underdeveloped, yet promising, part of my neighborhood. Whether some of the areas “adjacent” to the project were dumps prior to is irrelevant as the site itself (which covers, what, 22 some acres?) was a dump. And, note, I also give thanks to FCR for developing some of the areas in Fort Greene where the Atlantic Terminal Mall, Atlantic Center Mall (no, this isn’t the best looking mall, by a long shot, but its an improvement on what was there before and gives residents other options for shopping, etc.), and other buildings are.

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