The Sport Boarding School in Latvia: A Looping Campus Where Lessons and Training Share One Ring

Most sports schools treat the classroom and the training ground as rival claims on a student's day, connected by a corridor and a timetable. The Sport Boarding School in Latvia refuses that split. It folds classrooms, libraries, rinks and lounges into a single circular building, so that a student finishing a lesson is only a short walk along the same loop from the ice. The idea is simple, and the project is at its strongest when it lets that simplicity drive the plan.

Designed by Ranay Utkelbayeva and shortlisted in UnIATA '19, the scheme sits in Smeceres Sils, near Madona. The site spans 65 hectares, and the built footprint covers 31,600 square meters. The brief Utkelbayeva sets herself is broad: school facilities and self-education zones, indoor and outdoor hockey fields, tennis courts, biathlon tracks, spectator seating, dormitories for students and long-term residences for athletes. It reads less like a building than a small settlement organised around a training regime.

A Lakeside Pause Between Practice and Class

The opening render skips the arenas and goes straight to a cafe on the water. Slanted timber columns frame the glazing, grey chairs sit in loose rows, and a parent walks a child past under a heavy, stormy sky. It is a telling choice. The designer's text speaks of lounges, rest spaces and areas for social interaction as part of the core programme, not leftovers, and this image gives that claim a mood: a sheltered room where the pressure of competitive training can drop for an hour.

The angled columns also do quiet work. They break the rhythm of a conventional grid and echo the tilt of trees outside, which keeps the interior from feeling like a canteen bolted onto a sports hall. For a boarding school, where students live as well as study, rooms like this carry as much weight as the classrooms.

Terrain as the First Drawing

The physical model is built from stacked contour layers, and that method says a lot about the design's priorities. Before any building appears, the ground has already been read and sliced, step by step. On a 65-hectare site with biathlon and cross-country routes, topography is not a backdrop. It is the training equipment, and the model treats it that way.

The second render makes the link explicit. A timber-clad volume spans the water like a bridge, while skiers move across a misty, snow-covered slope beneath it, and a section drawing below shows how the building meets the ground. This is the project's most convincing moment: architecture placed directly in the athletes' line of travel, giving spectators and students a view of the course without fencing it off. The source text's mention of ponds, greenery and walking paths becomes something tangible here, a landscape that is used daily rather than admired from a window.

One Ring, Many Cubes

Seen in the model, the plan resolves into two clear systems. The main building forms a ring capped by oval white roofs, holding the shared life of the school in one continuous loop. Around it, cube-shaped dormitory blocks are scattered across the layered contours, smaller in scale and loosely arranged. The designer describes the circle as a symbol of the cycle of growth and learning; more practically, it lets very different spaces stay connected without one wing dominating the others.

The wider view, with small wire trees dotted between the blocks, shows the balance the scheme is after. The ring is collective and public, able to host local sports events and spectators as the brief intends. The cubes are private and residential, set back in the landscape. It is a familiar campus logic, but the clarity of the white loop against the stepped ground gives it a strong, readable identity.

Why This Project Matters

Sports education is often housed in buildings that separate effort from rest and learning from training. Utkelbayeva's proposal argues for proximity instead: classrooms, rinks, lounges and trails held close enough that a young athlete's day feels like one continuous environment. The ring plan, the bridge-like volume over the water and the contour-driven siting all serve that argument, and they make it legible at a glance.

The sustainability claims stay general in the submission, citing energy-efficient systems, sustainable materials and passive strategies without detailing them, and a fuller account of how the ring performs through a Latvian winter would strengthen the case. Still, as a shortlisted UnIATA '19 entry, the project offers a clear spatial thesis: that a school for athletes should be organised around the landscape they train in, and that the spaces between practice and class deserve as much design attention as the arenas themselves.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Ranay Utkelbayeva

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: The Sport Boarding School in Latvia by Ranay Utkelbayeva UnIATA '19 (uni.xyz).