Le Fonds Belval

As in a family photo, the individual members have their own individuality, but they also share similarities and behaviors that assimilate them. The sports center is conceived as an urban microcosm capable of interfacing with the wider macrocosm, constituted by the city in transformation around itself.

The choice to divide the complex into several buildings has a double reason. First of all, in order to respect the indications of the announcement that they see the possibility of realizing the complex in different phases over time. Secondly, to build a public space between the buildings and the outdoor fields that is welcoming, complex, articulated, able to provide integration to the wide spaces of the neighboring park and to integrate the nature of a sports center where so many intertwine different things: school and competitive spirit, entertainment and body care, educational activities and training, children and the elderly, parents and professional athletes. Sporting activity is a metaphor for urban life, and like that it is made up of exchanges, hard work, satisfaction, orientation, teamwork and individual play, waiting for the event and preparation for it.

The new sports center is a small-scale urban dimension, consisting of buildings and open spaces, paths and limits, perimeters and accesses. The sections of the paths, the dimensions of the spaces between the buildings, the perspectives that open between them, are measured to obtain a vibrant, rich, balanced and liveable space. The new sports center must relate to the rest of the city with a strong identity, and this identity does not result in a single large complex building, but increases over time in the construction of a theory of buildings of different scales, each capable of bringing a contribution of meaning to the configuration of the microcosm.