Barclays Facade Not Winning Over Neighbors, Also May Drip On You

The rusty finish of the Barclays Center façade may have its fans in the architecture and design world, but neighbors wonder if the aesthetics may be lacking, says the New York Times.

Passersby interviewed for the paper about the façade thought it looked unfinished, with one man believing that it was going to be painted over.

In fact, a Patch poll from March found that , with only 30 percent thinking the façade looked “21st century,” and three percent not sure.

The weathering steel develops a thin layer of rust, which then acts as a protective coating against moisture, slowing its own corrosion process almost completely. The material does have one backdraw, as the Times points out  – the rust tends to drip onto the pavement below.

“When the material gets wet, there is a rusty wash that goes down onto adjacent areas of concrete,” Michael Devonshire, a materials expert at architecture firm Jan Hird Pokorny Associates told the paper. “It can get really funky looking.”

The steel on the Barclays Center was weathered for about four months at an Indianapolis plant, where it was put through more than a dozen wet-and-dry cycles a day in an effort to fend off much of the orange drippings.

The process put about six years of weathering onto the steel, which, according to Robert Sanna, a Forest City Ratner executive should keep the dripping to a minimum.

“You won’t have to worry that it will stain your sweater as you walk by,” Sanna told the paper.