Forest City Ratner construction exec offers new Barclays Center details

A Forest City Ratner executive offered new details about the Barclays Center basketball arena planned for the Atlantic Yards development site at a speech before the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. According to Atlantic Yards Report, Bob Sanna, the firm’s executive vice president of construction, said the arena will be limited to 675,000 square feet — too small to house a hockey team, as many basketball arenas do — because of financing difficulties in 2007 and 2008. The arena will hold 18,000 people and sit 25 feet below grade, meaning the high-priced ticket-holders won’t walk up stairs to their seats. The exterior steel facade was designed by SHoP, and will have a “gritty urban character” thanks to pre-weathered steel that endured eight-years-worth of wet-dry cycles over four months. Addressing other areas of the project, Sanna said it will include parking facilities and a practice facility for the Nets, and also downplayed the developer’s prefabricated modular construction plans as nothing more than “a research project.” [Atlantic Yards Report]