Slovenia-based Enota shared with us their project Velenje Sports Park, for which they received first prize in an open competition. More images and architect’s description after the break.
The area of the new Velenje sports park lies on a very important location between the City Park and the lake. Lake area is already a popular recreation point of citizens and it also offers great scenery with lake, extensive greenery and beautiful hills behind. Velenje Sports Park is therefore designed as an open uniform surface, accessible as much as possible to the townspeople and other visitors.
Throughout the new sports park, the great number of major sports facilities and outdoor sports areas are planned. Thus big objects designed for competitive sports events also take a lot of space. Despite the fact that most of the time, training and recreation take place on them and therefore the sport surfaces could be freely seen, usually the are closed to the outside views because of the small fraction of operating time, when tickets are sold for the events. Visual link of visitors with sport fields at no-game time increases a feeling of spaciousness of the area. Constant contact with the action on the playing grounds contributes to the attractiveness of the area and lift enthusiasm for the sport, because it brings it closer to bigger amount of people. The establishment of open views to the playing areas during no-match time, was therefore one of the primary goals in designing architectural solutions for the area.
Setting the roofed stands on the outer edges, creates large arena with a lower middle field on which the visitors can walk in no-match time and from which they have unobstructed views of the stadiums. During the events, the main promenade of course closes. That is achieved through access control placed on narrow spots on access roots to elevated central square. In such spatial organization no additional fences are required as this role is played by level differences between the programs and stands alone.
The three required programs, sports hall, athletics and football stadium are organized around a central facility with common program, which is placed under the connecting paths between the playgrounds. Partial burial of the central part of complex enables separate construction of main sport objects at any time and any order. Commercial public program is placed at the lakeshore side but also all the other programs of Sports Park are opening towards the lake and its picturesque background. All the sport facilities of the area are surrounded by extensive preserved and supplemented greenery.
With new Sports Park the city is not gaining only contemporary sports facilities intended for professional sport events at the highest level, but also a new urban area, which offers a number of opportunities for active leisure and connects city center with until now somewhat truncated lake area.
Architect: Enota Location: Velenje, Slovenia Project Team: Dean Lah, Milan Tomac, Nuša Završnik Šilec, Alja Černe, Polona Ruparčič, Nebojša Vertovšek, Petra Ostanek, Maruša Zupančič Size: 29,300 m2 Year: 2010
