The Barclays Center is a major venue seating up to 19,000. Since opening in 2012, it has hosted more than 200 cultural and sports events each year. Sited at a point where historic low-rise Brooklyn neighborhoods merge with the taller buildings of its booming downtown, Barclays was shaped by a responsibility to achieve balance. The arena’s iconic exterior is built from 12,000 uniquely-shaped panels in weathered steel that recall the color and scale of adjacent brownstone blocks.

Barclays was carefully designed to serve as a social, civic, and economic catalyst for Brooklyn, and it has been embraced by its neighborhood and the borough at large. Breaking with precedent, at ground level the arena establishes an open and welcoming connection to the street.

Barclays stands as a pioneering achievement in construction technology—a digital landmark as well as a civic one. Responding to the strict time and budgetary constraints on the project, we developed a model-based process that integrated all of the information necessary to streamline the design and delivery of the 12,000 unique facade panels with the direct output of digital instructions for their fabrication and assembly. This technique can eliminate the need for conventional drawings, while aligning the imagination of our designers as closely as possible to the capabilities of the automated machinery used in component manufacturing.