Dominique Coulon Folds a Climbing Wall and 750 Seats into a 1960s Gymnasium in Thionville

The brief was deceptively simple: take a municipal gymnasium and theatre dating from 1960, keep what matters, and deliver a contemporary sports complex that can also host large-scale cultural events. Dominique Coulon & associés answered with a 4,554 m² building in Thionville that hides its structural skeleton to produce vast, uninterrupted interior volumes. A 12-meter-high rhythmic gymnastics hall, a 42-meter-wide climbing wall sculpted to simulate real rock, and a 750-seat terraced stand all coexist under rooflines borrowed from the old theatre facade. The result is a building that reads as contextual from the street and quietly radical once you step inside.

What makes the project worth studying is the reversibility of its program. The multipurpose hall and the gymnasium can merge into a single 2,800 m² event space. The tiered spectator stand doubles as a circulation device, rising from the ground floor court to the first-floor multipurpose room. Every major space is calibrated for natural light: a triangular opening carved into the climbing wall, a 46-meter-long glazed section, and a white upper gymnasium envelope that scatters daylight evenly for competition-grade illumination. Geometry is not decoration here; it is infrastructure.

Street Presence and the Preserved Stone Plinth

From the street, the complex does not announce itself with spectacle. White metal panel volumes sit on a stone base salvaged from the original structure, a deliberate link between decades. The entrance portico was kept as a civic landmark, and a section of the building was set back specifically to preserve a majestic Lebanese cedar on site. These are small acts of deference that prevent the new from erasing the old.

The pale horizontal massing reads differently depending on the season. In autumn, golden plane trees soften the corrugated metal cladding. In winter, the pruned branches expose the building's geometric clarity. It is a facade designed to share the frame with its landscape rather than dominate it.

Corrugated Metal and Red Louvers: A Composite Skin

The exterior envelope alternates between vertical corrugated metal panels and sections of red louvers, creating a rhythm that hints at the programmatic variety within. A triangular corner window at the junction of two facade planes signals the dance room inside. The composite character of the skin is not arbitrary: the forms are borrowed from the existing theatre facade, so the new volumes carry a genetic trace of the predecessor.

At dusk, the red louvers glow against the smooth rendered base, giving the building a warmth that its daytime restraint might not suggest. The silver section of the multipurpose hall overhangs the stone plinth course, creating a shadow line that sharpens the distinction between old and new material.

The Golden Ceiling and Monumental Staircase

Enter the reception hall and the first thing you register is the golden ochre ceiling, a warm canopy hovering above the architectonic concrete of the monumental staircase. Perforated metal panels and suspended acoustic elements modulate the lobby acoustically while establishing a material palette that runs throughout the public circulation zones. The concrete is left honest, its formwork texture visible, and the color temperature of the overhead plane turns what could be a cold transit space into something closer to a foyer.

The staircase is the building's primary organizational device. It delivers you simultaneously to the ground-floor gymnasium door, the hallway to the dance room, and the upper multipurpose room. Its split levels and landings are deliberately generous, scaled for the crowds of 750 who will use them on event nights.

Stairwells and Mezzanine Light

Coulon's interior corridors are exercises in controlled compression and release. The concrete stairwell with metal railings leads past red accent windows that frame views of bare winter trees, pulling the outside into vertical circulation. The golden vaulted ceiling continues overhead, tying these secondary spaces back to the lobby's identity. Even in a utilitarian corridor with recessed doorways and linear ceiling lighting, the proportions feel considered rather than leftover.

The Climbing Wall as Architecture

At 42 meters wide and 15 meters high, the climbing wall is not an add-on; it is a wall of the building. Sculpted to resemble the uneven surface of a real mountain cliff, it accommodates lanes for international competition while serving as the visual anchor of the main sports hall. A horizontal white viewing platform cuts across its face at mid-height, creating a balcony from which spectators and coaches watch climbers ascend. The triangular opening at the top of the wall is not merely sculptural: it channels natural light into the gymnasium below.

The colorful holds scattered across the surface introduce the only high-saturation palette in the hall. Against the exposed metal deck ceiling and blue tiered seating, they read almost like a mosaic. When the wall is not in competition use, it becomes a textured backdrop to badminton, basketball, and other court sports played on the marked floor below.

Gymnasium Courts and Event Flexibility

The gymnasium operates under two distinct ceiling conditions. In one zone, a red-lit coffered ceiling hangs over the court, with a glazed wall offering borrowed light and views into the adjacent courtyard. In another configuration, recessed ceiling panels and blue tiered seating define a multipurpose sports hall calibrated for competition broadcasting, complete with three large screens and a dedicated control unit.

The ability to combine both halls into a 2,800 m² event space is the project's most consequential programmatic move. The 750-seat terraced stand is not a fixed grandstand but a connective tissue between levels and between uses. When the multipurpose hall pivots from spectator seating to the gymnasium's upper lobby, the architecture does not change; only the flow of bodies through it shifts.

Light, Dance, and the Courtyard Edge

The rhythmic gymnastics studio receives daylight through three square skylights and a fully glazed courtyard wall, flooding the space with even illumination. Children practicing beneath those skylights occupy a room whose proportions and light quality belong more to a gallery than a gym. The dance studio, located at the corner of Rue Général Walton Walker and Boulevard du XXe Corps, is oriented toward the park, with a mirrored wall and horizontal light strips creating a long visual axis through trees.

The courtyard facade, visible from inside as a layered composition of blue metal bleachers, red tiled walls, and glazed upper levels, acts as an interior elevation. It is the one point where the building reveals its full sectional complexity to the occupant, collapsing exterior and interior into a single frame.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals how carefully the building negotiates its urban block, with setbacks preserving existing trees and parking tucked to the periphery. The ground floor plan shows the gymnasium with its basketball court occupying the largest single volume, flanked by support spaces that service the climbing wall, dance room, and reception hall. The first floor plan clarifies the relationship between the 750-seat bleacher and the multipurpose hall, demonstrating how spectator flow connects vertically through the monumental staircase.

Cross sections are where the project's ambition becomes legible. The gymnasium's 12-meter interior height, the split-level stairwells, and the overhanging silver volume above the stone plinth all register in profile. The elevations show a building that keeps its rooflines deliberately low and varied, deferring to the surrounding tree canopy rather than competing with it. Northeast and southwest elevations read almost as two different buildings, which is exactly the kind of contextual duality Coulon was after.

Why This Project Matters

Public sports facilities rarely receive this level of architectural attention. Budgets constrain, programs dominate, and the result is often a shed with bleachers. Coulon's Thionville complex proves that a civic building operating on a modest €11.7 million budget can still deliver spatial richness, genuine programmatic flexibility, and a facade that participates in its streetscape rather than ignoring it. The reversibility of the multipurpose hall, the climbing wall functioning simultaneously as structure and spectacle, the preserved stone plinth linking six decades of civic history: these are design decisions that compound in value over time.

The project also matters as a case study in adaptive reuse without nostalgia. The original gymnasium and theatre are not musealized; they are metabolized. New concrete volumes grow from the old stone base. The theatre facade's forms reappear, abstracted, in the new skin. The Lebanese cedar remains. What Coulon demonstrates is that context does not require imitation. It requires paying attention, keeping what works, and being precise about where the new begins.

Thionville Multipurpose Sports Complex by Dominique Coulon & associés, Thionville, France. 4,554 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Eugeni Pons.

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