Sports centre
On the outskirt of the 20th arrondissement of Paris, in one of the capital's poorest neighbourhoods, the sports centre is located on a plot wedged between a renowned street-art spot and large social housing buildings. The new Angélique Duchemin sports centre, at the heart of the first ZAC (urban development zone) in Paris, created in the 1970s, was designed in close consultation with local stakeholders. The new building runs alongside the pedestrian alleyway, reinforcing its status as a ‘spotlight’ with a 45-metre opaque wall defining the base and boundary of the new sports facility. The dojo, weight room, and rooms for community use are housed in a simple, optimised volume above the masonry wall. Complemented by the four sports fields, two of which are covered, the whole complex forms a uniform enclosure that provides a new public space by widening the alleyway at the junction with Rue des Cendriers. Its shape and neutral colour reconcile the domestic dimension of the hilly streets with the imposing presence of the social housing residences overlooking it. The prominence of these clear, immaculate silhouettes encircling the site compels the sports centre to contract into a compact object capable of responding to the surrounding multi-coloured tones.
All the heated areas are housed in a building with a simple volume and a white metal envelope. This simple, effective object is extended at the rear by a translucent polycarbonate extrusion. Although twice as large, this second building, which houses the two covered courts, subtly integrates into the space formed by the recesses created by the surrounding housing blocks that enclose the sports centre. The trivial archetype of the hangar, the most effective architecture for accommodating a variety of unconstrained uses, is gradually stripped bare. While the covered courts discard their partition walls, reducing the volume to a simple roof, the uncovered fields, defined solely by their translucent fences, gradually dissolve the perimeter of the architectural space.
Despite its radically simple geometry and obviously economical materials, the sports centre is concerned with producing effects of transparency and material relationships that enrich the spatial quality and usability of this essential program for the neighborhood.
The architectural design of the Angélique Duchemin sports centre is based primarily on a close reading of its programme and socio-economic issues, rather than its near context. Here the context is sport and its users. In fact, it is this sporting and popular programme that above all guides the choice between prioritising the amount of covered surface area or the sophistication of the systems and materials used.
In a clear hierarchy of use over space, the building is made of raw, durable materials: cinderblock partitions, recycled aluminium curtain walls, ventilation ducts and acoustic baffles. Sheltered by a metal structure, white on the outside and dark blue on the inside, it recalls the importance of defining an architecture without containers, where the separation between what covers it and what it occupies is crucial. Simply clad with ribbed panelling that sequences the mass of the envelope, the building is organized to ensure fluid accessibility and usage while maintaining flow control.
The upstairs dojo room, meanwhile, features dark blue tones in contrast to the building envelope, but in tune with the practice of the discipline, which requires deep colours conducive to concentration. Although standard in manufacture and installation, the external joinery, which provides natural light on the first floor, creates a solemn atmosphere that highlights the importance of the floor in combat sports, and which avoids visual glare for the athletes. This low-angled light, combined with the painting of all the structural and technical elements, conceals the ventilation and heating systems without the need to cover the space with a suspended ceiling, thus providing cost savings and an increase in ceiling height.
On the ground floor, by contrast, the various areas (boxing hall, community space, changing rooms and annexes) are bathed in light thanks to the thoughtful use of breezeblocks, which give this industrial material a novel quality through the attention paid to their joints and the fine design of the visible networks, from ventilation ducts to light switches. The interior architecture demonstrates that a considered conception of the ‘strict minimum’ can ultimately create a rich ambience.
Conceived as a sports hangar where only the function speaks, the sports centre is characterised by an economy of formal means. The clear tone of the whole reveals the site's activities rather than the facility itself.
While all the fields are protected by a white metal mesh, the building blends into the site by disappearing behind a simple grey breeze-block wall allowing urban practices to sometimes take precedence over any architectural feature.
In the same way that the covered volumes are designed solely to accommodate sports activities, without any attempt to develop their own language, the surfaces offered to the public on the alleyway - nicknamed the ‘graffiti street’ - are also designed to host a community practice that is structurally important to the neighbourhood.
The Angélique Duchemin sports centre illustrates the conviction the belief that simplicity, the strict minimum, and project economy are as much architectural stances as they are tools for social dialogue. Where austerity is achieved through subtraction, here sobriety is achieved through multiplication: a wall that is both structure and finishing work, a fence that doubles a volume, an industrial material that reveals itself through its relationship with light, making the whole more generous in its uses.
CREDITS
Design team: graal (lead architect, OPC),
LGX (all trades, economics), A2Csport (sports consultant), Travaux Pratiques (signage)
Construction team: Picheta (asbestos removal, demolition), Cabrol (structural work, framework, cladding, roofing), Plastalu (exterior carpentry, metalwork), Sorbat (partitions, plasterboard, false ceilings, interior carpentry), T.E.P. (flooring), Pougat (painting), BSMG (heating, plumbing, ventilation), Afilec / Bouygues (electricity, photovoltaic), NSA (elevator), Nouansport (sports equipment), Les paveurs de Montrouge (VRD)
