Building onto Barclays

The first puck has dropped, the second annual tip-off is just around the corner, the concert lights have blazed for the hundredth time.

But it’s outside Barclays Center where the real action is about to take place.

In the coming weeks, Forest City Ratner, developer of the arena and the surrounding 22-acre site, will truck in the cornerstone of the first of 14 residential towers planned for the decade-old project.

And what a cornerstone it is. Corner-module might be more apt.

B2, as the 32-story apartment building is known, will be the largest modular building in the world when it is completed, tentatively next summer.

“Once we’ve cracked the code of building modular high-rise housing, there’s no telling what could happen,” said Melissa Roman-Burch, senior vice-president for development at Forest City Ratner.

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The tower will not only transform this little corner of Brooklyn, bringing the first 363 of 6,000 apartments to Atlantic Yards, but it could well remake the entire housing industry in the city, saving both time and money for developers and tenants.

“We’re facing a housing crisis in the city,” said Ingrid Gould-Ellen, director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. “Anything that can deliver more housing more cheaply and more quickly has huge potential.”

Rather than traditional construction, where the building is assembled piece-by-piece on site by a variety of construction workers, specially trained teams of union laborers are hard at work at a warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yards the size of two football fields.

Some 930 modules will be produced there in the coming months for B2, with thousands more on the horizon as the rest of the site is built out in the coming decade or two (a point of some contention with the project’s opponents).

The modules, each 40 ft. by 12 ft., just a little larger than the average shipping containerso the mods fit on the trucks that will drive them a mile up Vanderbilt Ave. from the Navy Yard to the tower site at the corner of Dean and Pacific streets. Each one is essentially a self-contained apartment, or a piece of one.