Sports centre, Bratislava

The new RELAXX Sport Centre exploits the unruly growth in the Petrzalka residential district where it stands. In the words of the architects 'its shape organizes the noise and chaos of the site, and materializes the restlessness and the poetics of velocity'. This long-awaited building stands adjacent to the Atrium department store by Zavodny architects, a project that has received several architectural prizes.

The sports centre design had to take account of several constraints. The railway and a highway are very close to the building and the main sewer pipe for the whole district runs beneath the plot. These conditions have informed the project, which seems to defy both the rules of gravity and conventional ideas of what a sport and wellness centre should look like. Standing on pillars of exposed concrete, the exterior gives very few clues as to the facilities behind – it could just as easily be the facade of a progressive office. The building fits in with its context, yet makes a big impact on the urban scale with only a few architectural means.

The sports centre is an elongated volume, one hundred metres long and 14 to 20 metres wide. Its six floors contain shops and services a health care and wellness centre, fitness facilities and swimming pools. It is a monolithic concrete structure, with a Titan zinc skin and a fully glazed north-east elevation. The simple but dynamic gesture of the twisted form is reminiscent of 1970s architecture, but can also be seen as a departure from contemporary architectural production in Bratislava, which is now – unlike during the late-modern 1970s – anything but a fertile ground for radical ideas.

For AK2, this project has been instructive. It catapulted them from the anonymity of a small start-up practice to the stage of high-profile architects in Bratislava. But the initial euphoria of a direct commission from a private client who wanted a radical external appearance was tempered by the fact that the brief was confined to the building as container and the architects were denied control over the design of the interior.

Lacking a properly designed interior, the project relies purely on the strength of its iconic appearance. In this sense, the building exemplifies the constraints on architecture, and architects, in Bratislava today. In this context architecture can only have limited success. Most work is done by well-established practices that merely turn out ‘decent’ architecture. Only occasionally does a young practice get a chance to break the still waters, but then they have to endeavour to keep control of the whole process, and to resist manipulating forces. Consequently, architecture that is refreshing and unexpectedly new is rare in Bratislava. In this light, the sports centre is quite an achievement. Although the optimism inherent in the architecture of the Relaxx Sport Centre was partly constrained by a rather conservative pragmatism on the side of clients, thereby reducing its potential impact, AK2 managed to create a photogenic piece of architecture that offers, at least for the moment, the welcome shock of surprise in an otherwise mediocre urban landscape.