Municipal Sports Pavilions. Olot. Gerona

NEW SPORT BUILDING IN OLOT

The new Sports Hall is built as a volume levitating above the ground. The body achieves a clear and well-rounded geometry. As a result we get the possibility to use the area above the body of changing rooms for small-format sports (table tennis) as well as services and facilities areas.
The cover, stepped to the rhythm of the beams illuminates a large interior white space. The most important thing of the playing court is the activity, the sport and the play. Inside, the building appears as a blank canvas, a big empty frame where sport is developed. Only the volume that houses the changing rooms, warehouses, and small-format sports appears contrasted in dark. As the choir of a Gothic church, it departs from the central sports courts area facing towards it in a stair-shape way.

Behind this volume lies the access way to the changing rooms of the athletes, solving the isolation of the circulation area for sport shoes exclusively. Access to the building must be resolved through a separate volume, an elongation of the interior body of the changing rooms that moves outside the building to welcome visitors

Outside, the green of the trees’ leaves, and their shadows are reproduced in the pixel pattern of the new pavilion’s façade. Ahead of this one, a polycarbonate skin blurs the colors of the façade and the real dimension of the building. The external image of the building is elusive; it varies depending on time of day or angle of vision. Sometimes the building blends with the sky, sometimes is confused with the trees, at times the building seems to have its own light.

The double façade works, on the other hand, in the thermal conditioning of the building. The heat captured by the walls thanks to the greenhouse effect is used during the winter for heating, while in summer causes a flow of natural ventilation. The main volume is raised a few feet off the ground, releasing a fully glazed ground floor, so that it is possible to play sports on the inside with permanent views to the outside.

SKATING CENTER IN OLOT

The new Skating Center is actually an extension of an existing sports pavilion. The volume is solved with the most clear and convincing geometry possible, as a box on the ground containing the skating rink, the stands for the spectators, the climbing wall, as well as the additional spaces and vertical circulation.

The continuous skin of the facade in corrugated steel sheet accentuates the volumetry of the pavilion, giving an abstract and a uniform appearance to it, while retaining the horizontality of the main facade of the existing pavilion.

Both volumes integrate harmoniously one into each other, despite using distinct architectural languages. The formal simplicity involves order and an optimization of the interior spaces as well as the communication with the existing pavilion. The new volume tries subtly to hide from its surroundings as if, because of its timidity and despite its size, it tries to disappear.