When it comes to new sports buildings in the UK, all attention is focused on plans for the Olympics in 2012 and on Glasgow’s bid to host the Commonwealth Games two years later. The subtext to both is that while a range of spectacular venues will be constructed in both cities, the trickle-down benefit for sporting organisations throughout the UK is the promise of an ongoing increase in public participation in sport for many years afterwards. Whether this happens depends largely on the range of facilities that are available now, for it is from these that Britain’s sporting stars of 2012 and 2014 will emerge, and their success will provide the stimulus for the rest of the population.

The troubling reality, however, is that, many of the UK’s existing sports venues, need to be upgraded or replaced. A significant number are independently-owned and run, but sporting opportunity for young people nowadays is more easily accessed in the nation’s schools, colleges and universities where provision ranges from the merely acceptable to the excellent.

 

An all-weather hockey pitch sits alongside the building in Pollok Park

In the case of Craigholme School, an independent school for girls in Glasgow, a new sports pavilion had become necessary to replace premises long since deemed inadequate. The brief called for an indoor hockey pitch with top quality beech wooden flooring, changing rooms/storage facilities on the ground floor, a mezzanine gallery and a first floor fitness room.  

Aside from ensuring that the range of accommodation could be provided within the available budget, the main design challenge was to situate the new project sensitively within the greenfield landscape of Pollok Park, home not only to the school’s existing playing fields, but also to one of the city’s most important museums, the world-renowned Burrell Collection. In these circumstances, the school intelligently elected to hold a limited architectural competition to help identify the best options available.

The winning design by Glasgow-based SMC Davis Duncan Architects is a tour-de-force of timber construction, a material choice suited not only to many types of sports facilities, but also as a counterpoint to the mature trees that form a backdrop to two sides of the building.

 

Beech flooring is a feature of the sports hall

The key design move that secured the commission can clearly be seen to be the pavilion’s striking curved profile, a shape achieved by employing a series of deep section glulam beams to laterally span the indoor hockey pitch and support the simple standing seam aluminium roof covering. The internal result of this design move is a departure from the longitudinal ridge beam solution that might otherwise have been expected: the elliptical curve of the glulam beams creates an unusual asymmetrical internal space that manages to avoid competing with the axial emphasis of the pitch itself. The structural connections too are married into the building’s architecture, with the fixed end of each beam housed in a metal shoe designed into a bench arrangement extending the length of the pitch. The elliptically curved sections are flitch-jointed to shallow curved glulam elements that collectively extend across the space and carry on through the wall to the building’s exterior. Here the eight beams are supported by slender galvanised steel columns sloped to suggest a buttressing function and to create an arcade effect to the front of the pavilion.  

Like most sports buildings, this one has a relatively simple plan formulated around the required dimensions of the activity it is designed to house. The curved glulam beams have been used here, however, to transcend the pavilion appearing as a simple rectangular box, an effect enhanced by the skewing of the roof covering to form a trapezoidal plan shape. This is a clever three-dimensional geometrical move that extends the eaves over one end of the building side to provide a flying canopy to the main entrance.

 

The open-jointed rainscreen

The external cladding too, has been used here to articulate the pavilion’s internal functions. At ground floor level, the untreated Siberian larch boarding is horizontally fixed in a conventional board-on-board arrangement to indicate enclosure and enhance the building’s security provision. At first floor level this gives way to an open jointed rainscreen arrangement in which every two wide boards are interspersed with one long narrow batten to create an almost classical rhythm. At this level, the boarding is layered against metal studwork and recessed window frames to enrich the texture of the wall.  

The largest glazed areas are at first floor level, indicating the major space within and providing it with a high level of natural light. Services are integrated into the facade design, with a partial passive ventilation system drawing in cool air over the hall and extracting it at high level over the mezzanine.

Craigholme School now has a facility that will serve it well for many years to come and it is to the architects’ credit that the final building, with its striking curved form and its carefully considered approach to sustainable design, varies hardly at all from the proposal that secured the commission. And, at £1.735m, excluding fees and VAT, the school’s new pavilion ably demonstrates that inventive use of timber need not come at a premium to other forms of construction.