Turnhalle Haiming
Haiming, a village with almost 2000 inhabitants lies at the meeting of the rivers Inn and Salzach. The natural environment of both rivers, their valleys and meadows, characterize the landscape of the Niedergern. Rare bird species nest and breed in the nature reserve "Unterer Inn" and numerous beavers do their work. In the west of the village, behind the cow pastures and the forests, you can see the smoky chimneys of the nearby industrial area with its refineries and chemical plants. The design for a new club sports hall for SV Haiming also results from a similar ambivalence of "values". Despite many edificial banalities the spatial contexts reveals a structurally intact village centre. The urban setting of the new Sports Hall refers to this harmonious frame of reference. It follows the primacy of restraint and subordination. The play with banality actually is even the starting point of the design. Construction wise, but also on an architectural and formal level, the hall seems to be taken from the catalogue of local timber construction and precast factories. It refers to the cheapest and ignoble means of joinery – to the galvanized gang nail plate and corresponding binder and wall systems. In the sense of a spatial framework – which it actually isn´t – the roof construction creates the image of a filigrees surplus of supporting elements. On the other hand the posts, bars and diagonals are appropriated as large wall graphics. The breaking of the rule, as in the case of fat, sculptural-formed concrete beam on the inside of the south wall and the merely suspended prefabricates columns on the outside, are just as important as the rules and their formalisms themselves. The direct catchy image of a structure vs. a sort of vagueness, of what is truly load bearing and what is only an image of it. This ultimately results in a tension in contrasting pairs such as forced banality vs. a romantic scale on the outside and constructional pragmatism vs. "heroic" exaggerated construction on the inside.
