A Thousand Words

A poster on NDN shared a slide show the participants at JPW saw a few weekends ago concerning the "campus plan" and everything in the short and long term that will be built or improved on campus.

One of the pictures in that show, graciously extracted by FontOKnow, shows the new Joyce Center interior. I'd put a copy of it here, but it's too big to effectively show.

Lots and lots to like:

Enclosed arena. Part of the problem with the noise level in the JC is the open upper concourse, which allows sound to escape into the rest of the building where it does no one any good. Enclosing the arena will help to keep the sound where it belongs and helps.

Permanent seating of a uniform, dark color. Looks much cleaner (and better) both in person and on television, not to mention making a better fan experience.

Unobtrusive video scoreboard. Keeping them at the edges of the arena allows everyone to see them while not affecting television coverage or views of the overall arena from all seats. I also like they're keeping the traditional "over the exits" boards.

Loge seating that doesn't disrupt sightlines. Instead of being at half court where everyone can see if they don't show up, the box seating is now in the first part of the upper level where no one but them will know if they're there.

Down-to-sidelines seating. The free space around the court is effectively filled, with the press under the basket and seats on the sidelines coming all the way down to the playing area. This will make the arena look a lot more intimate (and, hopefully, intimidating).

Edit #2: A clean, standardized floor. The floor in this rendition looks very clean and uniform. One hopes a part of the plan is to get rid of the Foxworthy-esque "working floor on top of the non-working floor" setup and install the quality floor as it should have been from the get-go.

One thing I can't quite tell from the picture is seating level. It looks, to my untrained eye, like the concrete barriers behind the current floor-level seating have been closed (if not pushed back a couple of rows) and the seats behind them raised slightly. If that's the case, it could mean availability for student seating courtside, but we'll have to see.

Edit: What I find interesting is the placement of the loge section. Previous pictures had the raised seating section, but also had glass "skyboxes" under them. This picture doesn't show them, but rather shows concrete. If those seats are really raised that high, you could easily put the student section along the sidelines all the way up to the upper concourse. Again, we'll have to see.