UCPA Sport Station Bordeaux Brazza (The Sports Cathedral)

The project is a multifunctional sports facility offering a wide range of sports and festive programs such as : - Climbing comple, unique in France (block + 14m wall + high line + jump line) - Racket zone (padel tennis and squash) - Weightlifting and fitness spaces - Escape game - Esports - Golfing (educational trail, practice, putting green) - Restaurant area The roof has a practice driving range for golf and for sporting events and festivals. Open to all, offering everyone a spectacular view towards the city centre and the vineyards this architectural statement underscores the building’s role as part of the geography of the Bordeaux region. Located on the site of the former Soferti factories, in a flooded land, the transparent project opens up 360° to this heterogeneous area, undergoing major change, to receive the echoes.

A genuine « Cathédrale des Sports », the building houses spaces for practicing sports superimposed, bringing together in a single volume a climbing complex, a racket zone, a bar area, fitness, esports and golfing. The building is designed to multiply routes and viewing points between the sports, the district and the city : terraces, recessed platform, hoppers, corridors, half-slabs, staircases, surrounded by agricultural windbreaking nets that protect users from drafts, create the conditions for a real empowerment of sport as an urban element in its own right. As many activities are outdoor sports, only a third of the building is heated and enclosed by a façade. The building develops a basic envionmental approach, an ecology of intangible : air. The whole complex “breathes”, naturally, and the built elements, i.e., the heating, air-conditioning, ventilation, and artificial lighting are reduced to a minimum for maximum gain in lightness and economy. In total, 900 000 kWh/year are saved, or a 56% reduction in consumption compared with the same project if it were a covered enclosure and savings of 2270 t CO2 or 63% of CO2 linked to its construction.

The building is designed as a simple assemblage of low-carbon concrete slabs, beams, and columns. The materials and colours of this architecture are intentionally sober. With a simple, low-carbon PMES cement CEM3 concrete structure allowing a very light and bright color and prestressed hollow slabs of 11.50 m long from « Viguetas Navarras » (a spanish family business). The stucture is merely the support for uses of future users and allows great ease of programmatic adaptation over the time. A great deal of attention has been paid to the salient elements such as the reception desk, the staircases, and the stands. They encourage users to move about the building on foot, thereby further reducing the need for lofts. These linking spaces in the building become places unto themselves.