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Pfaffenholz Sports Centre
m Burgfelderhof, Saint-Louis (France)
1989 - 1993
Located precisely on the border between Basel and St. Louis, the sports centre is a project in the French part of Basel's surrounding agglomeration. The entrance for both French and Swiss visitors is from the Swiss side. A large hall, divisible into three small gymnasiums and a gymnastics room, forms the midpoint of the sports centre. The surrounding galleries serve as access areas and for larger sports events as additional seating space. A long low building with a cantilevered projecting roof is built onto the cube of the glass hall. It serves as the main entrance and houses infrastructures for the sports business (newspaper stand, snack bar, changing rooms and technical installations). A light athletic track for training and rehabilitation, three soccer fields and a covered all-weather field are ordered around the hall. Both hall and outside installations are accessible to wheelchair-users and handicapped. The building’s load-bearing structure is, in part, prefabricated, in part, made of locally cast concrete. The hall’s cube is sheathed in large format green glass plates. Through special imprinting the plates function as a filter for daylight penetrating into the hall’s inner spaces. The locker room tract is made of locally cast concrete. The underside of the projecting roof, the longitudinal façades and the square in front of it are covered in prefabricated concrete slabs whose surfaces have been roughened with a specially developed printing technique that makes them appear to be like photographic surfaces. The concrete surface mediating between outer and inner space at this entry point appears softer, almost textile-like. The printing of the glass plates and the concrete slabs ties together the two materials, otherwise highly differing in their appearance. The volumes of the hall and the locker room tract recede somewhat into the background in favour of the surfaces – playing fields, grass fields, and façades. (Text: Herzog de Meuron)