Collider Activity Center Competition Entry

Collider Activity Center Competition Entry / Ignacio Gias, Jesús Lorenzo Garvín, Ana Vida

Courtesy of Ignacio Gias, Jesús Lorenzo Garvín, Ana Vida

Located between two very different poles that have a great tension between them, architects Ignacio Gias, Jesús Lorenzo Garvín, and Ana Vida (Fissure Team), designed the building of the Collider Activity Center to appear as a flow connector in the territory. In doing so, they create a transition from the urban to nature, from the stability to the unpredictable, from colonized to wild territories. It is broken by an organic geometry, by the adventure, by the representation of the natural world, that cuts the building and makes the users ‘break it, break it through, to the other side’ as a door to adventure. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Climbing is about discovering, about exploring the environment, and searching new ways of understanding your physical context. When we first analyzed the project environment, on one side is a natural territory with no sign of human life except for some plants, which express the aim of people exploring their context. (They have been created with no planification the result of the continuous movement of anonymious people across the year following uncertain direction). This is the attitude Walltropia users search for in life, to explore and discover the unknown places in order to fully experience them.

As a climbing wall, the artificial realization and construction of a natural environment should limit or transition between an urban context to a natural one. In order to express this bipolarity, the building acquires a rigid, geometrical and massive character, that by the use of a grid pattern, pretends to represent the human world, the city, the knowledge and the stability.

In architectural terms, the building’s central space, the soul, is the climbing area. The building functions around the central core. This climbing area is also the exterior image of the project and consists of a 19 m high wall, which is naturally lit by the glass facade.

The climbing area divides the building in two. The west side contains the public programs, such as Spa, Fitness, Funtopia, Coffee shop or the multifuntional Hall. The other side, the east, houses the daily functions, such as offices, parking and restaurant. All the programs have permanent visual connections to the climbing hall across the climbing wall.

The exterior skin is a prefabricated metal that allows natural light to filter into the building. In order control the luminosity, a vertical garden its placed between the skin and the building. The vegetation acts as natural shading to various parts of the building.

Architects: Fissure Team (Ignacio Gias, Jesús Lorenzo Garvín, Ana Vida)
Location: Sofia, Bulgaria
Program: Climbing center
Project Name: Break on through to the other side
Area: 8,000 sqm; building program + 20,000 sqm of outdoor park program
Year: 2013