Warot Building
Warot is the latest addition to the public facilities of the village of Winksele. It hosts a wide range of activities in a carefully designed multifunctional hall and adds a new soft link to the village’s urban tissue by opening up the surrounding fields for play. The project embraces its messy rural context and elevates it through subtle design choices.
Warot is situated near an existing sports campus in a village in the Belgian countryside. The intervention is made up of a new building and a playing field, separated by a brook which will soon be crossed by a new bridge by UTIL. The bridge is positioned in such a way as to create a new, soft connection between the existing sports facilities and the local school, child care and youth centre, developing a new soft axis that connects the town’s public spaces and facilities.
The new building serves as the polyvalent catalyst of this axis and is designed as a space for a variety of activities ranging from children activities, card games to yoga classes. A low volume with a simple, symmetrical floor plan offers a base for these activities and serves as a backdrop for the playing field. A large bay window with a single fold emphasises the new connection with the village and offers it a welcoming facade.
This project aims to achieve a truly sustainable impact on the community for the long term. This implied increasing the complexity of the task by involving as many local actors as possible and seeking to do the most with the limited means available.
“More space for less budget” became the priority; it was decided to strategically invest the available funds where most impact would be had: in the spatiality, adaptability and the structure.
The building’s plan follows a structure of six parallel beams, generating spaces that can be interconnected or partitioned through the use of folding walls. These rooms are serviced by a wide corridor that serves as a backstage and hosts circulation, storage, and technical zones. A wide glazed bay faces the playing field across the brook, its sliding doors opening up to a covered outside space that form an extension of the interior space.
With these few tools, the multipurpose hall offers the village an open infrastructure where partitions can be moved and circulations multiplied to accommodate a wide array of activities. This open-endedness has attracted many new unexpected users to the project since it opened (e.g. a covid-19-facility).
Simplicity of structure and material is a cornerstone of the design. Common materials were chosen for their simplicity, ease of construction, durability and ease of maintenance while assuring a low ecological impact. Sand-coloured brick, brown concrete flooring, steel and metal ceilings are brought together through sensitive detailing to elevate their utilitarian nature. This reduced palette of sensible and everyday materials is applied in sensitive ways for both the interior and exterior finishes, adding to the simplicity of the architecture.
The clear and symmetrical plan ensures that the cost of the structure is reduced. The roof structure is made up of steel beams that hold up a steel perforated corrugated sheet. The choice to perforate this structural sheet and keep it exposed ensures the acoustic quality inside the building, while avoiding the cost of expensive acoustic finishing.
Interior walls are made up of non-loadbearing partitions and movable walls, assuring future adaptability as the village’s needs evolve. This emphasis on adaptability makes the project truly sustainable, assuring the building will remain meaningful for generations to come.