The Basque studio HIKA arkitektura designed this sports center outside the historic town of Balmaseda, in an area without much urban activity. The architects have used the building to bring back the life to those streets.
Description of the project by HIKA arkitektura
Balmaseda is a municipality in the county of Encartaciones and first Villa by founding in 1199, in the historical territory and province of Biscay, in the Basque Country.
However, the land that houses this building is located in a remote area of the town near the river Cadagua, in a decontextualized area.
The railway line linking Bilbao with Balmaseda and small urban development stemming from the real estate bubble are their immediate references with no architectural value buildings.
However, if we raise our eyes we can contemplate the majesty of the mountains that surround us. Peña Blanca, the rock of Sabugal, Picorredondo or Mazuco, among others. It is the essential, which shows the most delicate and unadorned aesthetics.
The proposal is presented as a set of rules that express the need to establish a true building complex. It is to make a simple and compact building, a construction that is conscious about the fact that maximum flexibility is only possible within a strict order, with a contemporary arrangement, the heavy and light, opaque and transparent.
The building overlooks the street with a linear light wall structure forming a foundation that aims to reduce the environmental impact of the surrounding buildings. On the basement overlooks the volume of the great room. To do this, we have imagined it as a large open box to get to input their own local targets. That is, the lighting, ventilation and natural air conditioning or solar energy, as well as getting enough height inside to allow sports. The proposal tries to not centralize completely the access but fill with life the main perimeter of the complex by filling it of use and traffic, with criteria of flexibility, permeability and continuity.
This is a box that works as a container building of sports uses. For this it has been thought a system that relates the structure, the facade and a general building covering based on a single coating curtain wall of U-glass. The reinforced concrete structure and the cover, a three-dimensional spatial lattice structure, provide that feeling of light-heavy building. The glass is used to introduce natural light and get inside an effect of full brightness. Just as an exterior-interior-exterior effect.
It is a building that is developed in the basement level and ground floor, with a total floor area of approximately 6,000 m2. In the basement uses, the indoor sports court, 18 locker rooms of different sizes, 2 multipurpose rooms, a gym, nursing and masseuse room.
At the ground floor the uses that need more direct access from the outside would be organized. The great hall also brings access to the site and the entrance to the stands of the arena.
