Stopiče Sports Center

Sports Center Stopiče is located in a small village near the town of Novo Mesto, which is the capital of Dolenjska region. This project offers a new answer to the question as to how a contemporary public infrastructure is placed into a typical Slovenian countryside. The building serves as a sports hall for the existing local primary school and also doubles as a community sports centre. The architecture responds to the “archetypal” location (countryside houses, a church tower and green hills of Dolenjska region) with the structure and orientation of building mass and the materials used. Service program of the sports centre and the connections with the existing school building are placed within circumferential ring that adapts to the slope of the terrain. This ring corrects and hides the scale of the main hall volume that rises in the middle as a large wooden outbuilding. In the interior, rooms are spread around the main hall and the passages, entrances and views are created in a way which enables the space to be as permeable as possible. The windows between individual parts of the centre enable the visitor to view over the entire building. There are two entrances, i.e. the main ...