Multifunctional Building in Municipal Sports Facilities
Malaga Architecture Award 2013
Diffuse interaction. Imminent interest. Light
An athletics stadium. A municipal sports center. A plot. Two levels. A problem. An opportunity.
As part of the remodeling and enlarging works on Fernando Hierro municipal sports facilities, the Town Hall commissioned us to design a storage building in a residual plot located inside the premises.
It consists on working on an island, a place forgotten for more than the fifteen years of existence of the sports center, a plot on hillside, adjacent to the track on the top level and to the tennis courts at the lower level.
From the outset, a need arose to generate a performance that could suture and connect two levels, two leading sports areas which had been coexisting but that have not understood each other for many years.
We proposed a two-storey building, thus ignoring the developer’s initial guidelines, obtaining a locker room for athletes on the ground floor, while leaving the entire upper floor for storage use.
Therefore, we aimed to double the requested area with the same budget, turning a simple and reviled storage area into a store and a new locker room. A complex and difficult but at the same time exciting challenge.
This was achieved through a performance based on the economy of means, on a particular and specific design, and on the confidence in the type and characteristics of a store.
Because performance itself is conceived as an opaque volume that is embedded in the ground, a metal crate piercing the topography; basically a store where a colorful changing room has been gestated. Happy together.
The whole volume is traversed by two large light boxes that illuminate the locker room, which are ignored by upper usage.
Similarly, the inner courtyards generated on the lower floor are not visible from this level, where they can only be felt and intuited, thus inviting to discovery. Courtyards are only visible from the upper level, but they are not visited, thus completing the poetic ‘wanting but being unable’, ‘with or without you’, misunderstood desire… the store that wanted to be a locker room.
A storage building with a galvanized steel industrial aesthetic, only tinged by a polycarbonate translucent skin in the facade that overlooks the track.
A glaze ultimately intended to delve the user into the land of intuition, returning the light from inside out into the stadium at night.
This subtle hint is complemented by the use of color, hidden, but hinted at various points of the building. Finally, user’s exploring interest completes the operation.
