School building and sportshall competition, 2019
in collaboration with NL Architects and Inside Outside/ Petra Blaisse
The sports hall is carefully positioned on the campus. The latent beauty of the orthogonal arrangement of the existing buildings is strengthened by the new additions. A crisp array of pavilions comes into being offering a nice sequence of well defined open spaces.
The sports hall manifests itself as a modest structure. The minimum amount of columns supports a concrete ‘hat’ that holds the roof. A continuous glass ribbon all around the building minimizes obstruction, it ‘dematerializes’ the pavilion on eye-level allowing cross relationships over the campus. A colonnade-without-columns wraps around the building creating a covered area offering shelter and shade.
The strategy for the existing gym hall is to strip it to its original state and build the required rooms as freestanding objects inside the remaining shell. In principle this would mean insufficient insulation. But by considering the space in-between as a buffer zone, a kind of half climate will come into being that can accommodate multiple forms of use.
(Text by Kamiel Klaasse)
structural engineer: Dr. Neven Kostic GmbH, Zürich
energy concept: Amstein + Walthert AG, Zürich
BÜRO Haller 