Nets arena housing halts construction, as builder says newfangled design “just doesn’t work”

I’m not up to researching the Atlantic Yards section of The Brooklyn Wars just yet (current status report: wrapping up Coney Island chapter, starting to move on to Bushwick and Downtown Brooklyn), but I may have to make an exception for this news: Work on the housing tower next door to the Nets‘ arena, which in recent months had finally started to take shape as the first of the project’s promised housing component, abruptly shut down this week amid complaints by the builder that designer/arena owner Forest City Ratner massively underestimated costs.

Take it away, Charles Bagli of the New York Times:

Skanska on Wednesday unilaterally closed the factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard where 157 workers assembled and built the steel-framed modules for the first of a planned 14 prefabricated apartment buildings, at Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street.

A day earlier, Skanska ceased work at the construction site, where the building rises to only 10 floors of its 32-story height, 21 months after work started.

“The purpose was to save time and money and they’ve done neither of those things,” said David Burney, a former commissioner of the city’s Department of Design and Construction.

For those who haven’t been religiously following the Atlantic Yards saga, this building was supposed to be a breakthrough in “modular construction,” where sections of the building are assembled offsite by assembly-line workers and then stacked up like Legos to make a giant apartment block. (As you can see from the work done so far, they even picked Lego colors.) This required building an entire factory to manufacture the modular units, which, surprise surprise, took a while; the finished building was originally supposed to open this summer, but remains only one-third completed.

And it looks like it’ll stay that way for a while, to hear Skanska tell it:

Richard A. Kennedy, co-chief operating officer of Skanska USA, was emphatic that, contrary to Forest City’s claims, it had not “cracked the code.” Its design, he said, was flawed.

“It just doesn’t work the way it was sold to work,” he said. “We’ve had real challenges with it that’ve delayed the project and led to cost increases. We finally came to the decision to stop work on the project until our significant commercial issues are resolved.”

Forest City, Mr. Kennedy said, had ignored its “design responsibility” under the contracts.

“It was represented to be a complete and buildable modular design,” he said. “That simply was not the case and that’s what we’ve been struggling with.”

None of this should be terribly surprising, given that using modular construction on anything over 20 stories is “quite out of the ordinary,” as Brooklyn modular architect James Garrison told me shortly after the project was first announced, since taller building require stiffer frames for wind resistance, which isn’t modular’s strong point. Still, here we are, two years after the arena opened, and the promised 6,430 units of new housing (one-third of which were supposed to be “affordable,” though it turned out most of those would go to families earning more than $100,000 a year) currently amount to one half-finished building that will now likely be tied up in litigation, or at least some really nasty out-of-court wrangling. According to a new deal negotiated in June to speed up development, Forest City Ratner will be subject to up to $2,000 per unit in penalties if the buildings aren’t completed by 2025, but the way things are going, it has to be a serious worry that FCR will just throw in the towel and take the fine.