- Area: 53500 m²
- Year: 2016
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Photographs:Gabriel Heusi, Andre Motta, Miriam Jeske, Ricardo Cassiano
Text description provided by the architects. The National Shooting Centre was built for the Pan American Games in 2007. This is an award-winning project done by the architecture office BCMF Arquitetos that has been carefully renovated by Vigliecca & Associates to meet Olympic standards without changing the identity of the original structure.
Although it is a recent construction, the building had to attend more specific standards established by the International Shooting Sport Federation and also needed maintenance upgrades for the target system as well as the air conditioning, hydraulic and electrical systems.
The project focused on meeting Olympic requirements, which included three times more seating capacity as well as making sure it would be useful after the Olympics once left as a legacy.
Since the required Olympic geometries were very different from what was found in the existing building, simply adapting the building seemed unworkable. The only solution would be to build a temporary shooting range for the finals next to the existing range. Once the cost estimate was found to be quite high, Vigliecca & Associados analyzed different ways of reconciling the requirements of the Olympic Games with the situation and was able to presented an innovative solution regarding the standardization of the finals range, using a lower visibility curve profile that adapted perfectly to the existing ceiling height and building geometry.
For this, a 2.000 seat temporary grandstand was placed over the existing 600 seats. Once the triple of seats was placed in the same area, the overall visibility angle also had to be reconsidered in order to guarantee visibility to all seats. The result was a softer angled grandstand. The best seats turned out to be the top ones instead of the first ones, just as in permanent stands, and will be designated to press members, also a requirement from the International Shooting Sport Federation. It’s worth mentioning that the first Olympic Medal will be given for this sport modality and surely the entire world will have their eyes on this facility.
This solution proved to be the most suitable for maintaining architectural harmony as well as being the most economical solution, since it only required the range to be expanded, without interfering much with the existing structure.
In order to increase the internal area, the shooting area was also expanded and placed under a temporary roofing system. Overall, the design allowed the internal space to be increased simply by being reconfigured instead of having to demolish any portion of it.
