Bovec Sports Hall

The Municipality of Bovec decided to build a new school hall, which, in addition to its primary purpose, has the ambition to become a generator of social and tourist activities in the area. With added programs of a bocce court, an events hall, a climbing center, a dance hall, running tracks, and courts, the hall will be the largest object in the area. We proposed several measures to adapt this XL object to the micro ambiance of the place with approximately 3000 inhabitants.

The object is located on sloping terrain, so we embedded it into the terrain, and installed running tracks and courts on the roof. We positioned the dance hall, bocce court, and multi-storey climbing wall into the recesses of the building's facade. With large glass surfaces, we opened these programs towards the street, thus making them more accessible to passersby.

In Slovenia, in smaller towns, school halls or fire stations are often used as a central event space. Therefore, we connected the level of the hall's courts with the square in front of the hall using movable glass walls. In this way, the indoor and outdoor space can become one stage, either for a Christmas market or inter-municipal sports competitions. In the existing park on the corner of the plot, we preserved the huge trees that have been serving for decades as a resting place for locals, and designed a children's playground on terraces that connect the upper and lower plateau of the hall.

We clad the facade and glass surfaces of the building's corridors in local wood, which also serves as a sunshade. We trimmed the corners of the flat roofs - an interpretation of the "čop" - a local peculiarity of traditional roofs, which are trimmed at the beginning and end.

Since the dominant feature of the plot is the local church, we shaped and sized all our interventions to subordinate to its presence. Our proposal received the third equivalent prize in an open public competition.