Embodying Excellence: Link Architects' Masterpiece Unveils a Dynamic Fusion of Sports and Culture

This site, located on the eastern edge of the town of Puy Guillaume, is remarkable for its open space that offers views of the Forez mountains and the surrounding countryside. The project plot is occupied by a car park, municipal workshops, and a car garage, creating an ambiguous situation for the building that will be the most voluminous of the complex. The project seeks to establish a connection with the great landscape, as well as an urban relationship with the town centre and the existing tertiary, sports, and technical buildings. It marks a strong and singular presence on the scale of its program while avoiding any form of brutality or rupture with the context. The building, a sports and cultural hall, enjoys an overhanging view of the entire site and forms a backdrop that partially obscures the technical services buildings. It assumes its character as a public facility, generously opening its spaces to the outside. The peripheral path to the rugby field naturally structures and organizes the routes and spaces of the site. The project reinforces this existing structure and seeks to clearly materialize this organization with a covered public gallery in an extension of the sports hall. This gallery protects the west facade and defines a friendly public space facing the rugby pitch. The volume of the construction is in the form of a “hat” in a wooden frame clad in a metal skin. It is the formal expression of the organization of uses, with the large hall and stands contained in a single volume at the optimized dimensions of 7m understructure. The other adjoining spaces are organized around the periphery of the room and are covered with roofs that give a human scale to the uses and allow a smooth transition between the differentiated spaces of the program. The project strives to integrate as well as possible in this territory, and to be a vector of construction sectors and local know-how, especially of the wood sector of the territories of the “massif central”, thus obtaining the BTMC label. The design of the structure contributes to the “rustic” quality of the interior space, while the mastery of light in the large room is controlled, guaranteeing optimal comfort for the practice of sport. It is naturally lit and has an unobstructed view of the outside, both to provide views of the rugby pitch and the landscape beyond, but also to show its activities from outside.

Architects: Link Architects

Area: 1570 m²

Year: 2022

Photographs: salemmostefaoui