Groundbreaker

THREE STUDIOS TEAMED UP TO CREATE CAMP DEL FERRO, A SPANISH ATHLETIC FACILITY OF SURPRISING COMPLEXITY

Barcelona’s Camp del Ferro sports facility is an elegantly complex group effort

When it comes to grand design projects in the public sphere, the residents of Barcelona know that good things come to those who wait. If the past 30 years were about transforming the city’s central neighbourhoods, the recent focus has been on reshaping the gritty outer suburbs. Currently, the Spanish metropolis’s most ambitious redevelopment project is in La Sagrera, which has promised to inject some landscaped cosmopolitanism into a working- and middle-class area characterized by pedestrian high-rise apartment blocks and defunct industrial buildings. Camp del Ferro — a newly completed sports centre for basketball, roller hockey and artistic skating — is one of the first finished buildings in this ongoing project.

A partnership of three established Barcelona-based studios — AIA Activitats Arquitectòniques, Barcelóbalanzó Arquitectes and Gustau Gili Galfetti — won the open competition for the structure. Reflective of a sensibility evident throughout the city, their proposal employs natural materials and inviting aesthetics while optimizing interior volumes and harnessing the surrounding public space.

For Camp del Ferro, the architects achieved this deft balance by placing two of the three courts in the facility underground, creating an elevated public square — suitable for community activities and accommodating of a large influx of visitors — on top of what is essentially one of the court’s ceilings. The unexpected softness of the building is achieved through an undulating roof (echoing an old mechanical workshop turned arts school next door) and a lattice-like brick “skin” (a gently rhythmic matrix of rectangular breeze blocks, both opaque and perforated). The warm terracotta used is a signature of the area’s old factories and warehouses.

“Our intention was to make this material the star of the building,” says architect Gustau Gili Galfetti. “And, given the high-rise nature of the neighbourhood, not to create something monolithic.” The interlacing brickwork has a functional element too, providing cross ventilation