A022_Sports Hall
Las Palmas, SpainThe Municipality of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria wants to revitalize the currently abandoned area called ‘Barranco de La Ballena’ (the Ravine of the Whale) creating a new metropolitan park. This park is a strip 3000 m long and 100-500 m wide that ends in the Atlantic Ocean and that will include several open sports facilities.
The area is 114.000 m² big with a highly rich topography.
The program requires a main sports hall for 10.000 seats (that could also serve as a concert hall, congress center, and as an indoor marketplace), a municipal sports center (including swimming pool, indoor tennis courts, another secondary sports hall, etc.) offices and the new layout of the surroundings, including parking for 1.000 cars and 10 buses.
Creating landscape
Following the natural existing topography on both sides of the site, ‘fluent’ platforms and undulating walls on different levels canalize the different flows through the site and become architecture by being elevated to higher levels to create the covering shells of the sports palace.
Park-parking
Integrated into the new landscape, the parking is proposed as a ‘park-parking’ that can be used as an open-air market, concerts hall, and sports ground.
Compacity
Instead of ‘spreading’ the program in different volumes throughout the site, it is condensed under the flying concrete shells creating a single macro-volume as the starting point of the whole landscape intervention along the park up to the beach.
Lightness and sea
The concrete shells create a ‘big eye’ on the north side of the big sports hall that frames a splendid view over the Atlantic Ocean and that allows a strong visual connection with the metropolitan park.
The clear and efficient structure filters the natural light into the inner space of the main sports hall improving the feeling of being still moving through an inner-outer fluent landscape under very changing light conditions depending on the time of the day and the season of the year.
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