This is two reviews. The first welcomes to town the new Barclays Center. The second, about the arena’s context in Brooklyn, gets trickier.  The arena opened around a month ago, a hunkered-down, hunchbacked, brooding sight at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. At first blush it’s a shocker, which is one of its virtues. Its rusted, reddish-brown exterior consists of 12,000 grainy weathered-steel panels, each one a little different, devised by the latest computer modeling: a digital-age extrusion of hard-core industrial glamour.  The panels swoop and curl lengthwise around the building, ancient chains binding a giant Gulliver. They leave openings here and there for ribbons of windows that provide peekaboo views out from and into the interior. At night the center mostly dissolves in the darkness, save at street level, where a monotonous concourse of shiny shops flanks its glossy front door. The door faces a new subway entrance with a landscaped roof on a broad, paved plaza.  This intersection provides the building’s outdoor spectacle, rusted panels jutting suddenly like a solar flare to create an open-roof canopy, a giant loop cantilevered 85 exciting feet from the arena wall. The inside of the loop becomes an electric billboard, underneath which the main entrance gives views from the street through the lofted lobby to the heart of the arena and its scoreboard hanging above a sunken floor.  Inside, the news is good. I thought it worth waiting a few weeks before writing, to see the place in operation, and I’m glad I did. Among other things, I caught a Jay-Z concert and watched the Nets lie down and die against the Celtics in an exhibition game. (Thursday’s scheduled season opener at the arena between the Nets and the Knicks was postponed.) The sound system needs adjusting, and alarming reports have surfaced via the local watchdog-blogger Norman Oder from neighbors complaining about noise and vibrations.  But crowd circulation is smooth, and the steeply raked seats, accommodating up to 18,000 fans, provide excellent sightlines for basketball, even from the nosebleed sections. The black-box vibe, with its gray-and-eggplant palette and terrazzo concourse, distinguishes it from Madison Square Garden, exuding a sophisticated chill, warmed by an eager, Disney-trained staff.  What else? Dire predictions about Carmageddon and post-event drunken mobs spilling into surrounding streets have not panned out, so far anyway, thanks to the beefed-up policing whose maintenance will be one of the key tests of the arena’s impact. This is not to say that new traffic patterns devised to steer drivers around the arena aren’t creating problems, sending more trucks past public housing to Third Avenue, for example.  But New Yorkers clearly got the memo about mass transit. I was repeatedly startled by how hassle free it was getting to the arena and back home during the pre- and post-event rushes.  You emerge from this new train station to find the egregious blue-and-white Barclays sign affixed to the arena facade. I gather that Barclays rejected more creative signage proposed by Pentagram, the design firm. What’s there is as discreet and incongruous as a cheap paper name tag glued to the lapel of an expensive suit, and gratuitous to boot, the architecture being distinctive enough to serve as the building’s logo.  That the center, like every other sports arena, serves both inside and out as a giant billboard for corporate naming opportunities (my favorite: the Calvin Klein V.I.P. Entrance) deserves mention because naming rights and other financial gains from the arena should be factored into the subsidized housing equation that remains one of the major obligations made by the developer, Bruce C. Ratner.  City housing subsidies are limited. Mr. Ratner has been trying to find ways to pay for his promise, repeatedly going back to officials in recent years to ask for more money and concessions about the mix and layout of apartments. More concessions to him ultimately means less money for public housing somewhere else. That Barclays sign should help pay for something besides its own bad taste.  The center’s architects are the partners at SHoP, the New York firm. They rode to the building’s rescue after Mr. Ratner sold public officials on a development plan by Frank Gehry, then, when the market tanked, replaced Mr. Gehry’s design with an off-the-rack plan by Ellerbe Becket/Aecom, a utilitarian outfit specializing in sports facilities. Astonishingly Mr. Ratner was not penalized for this turnabout, only lambasted, so he hired SHoP to dress up the Ellerbe Becket design (which had its merits, like the raked seating).  No, this isn’t a beautiful or ingratiating building, but it’s technologically smart, with an underground turntable for trucks that may sound eye-rollingly dull but makes traffic engineers like the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, swoon because it reduces the number of backing up and double-parked 16-wheelers on nearby streets like Dean.
Two Brooklyn architecture reviews in one: a rave for the Barclays Center arena, a pan for the larger development, and a plea to make the development worthy of the arena.