Review 2020.3 – Committed to elite sport
It is well known that our office team is not only enthusiastic about ingenious but also about sporting challenges. We can demonstrate our special sporting spirit every year at the skiing and hiking days and in various competitions on the running tracks, football and floorball pitches in the city and surrounding area. This is why construction projects in the field of sport are very close to our hearts, which also involve demanding challenges for structural planning with their mostly large spans.
With the starting up of the new OYM building in the north of Cham, a particularly ambitious construction project was completed in 2020. The new centre of excellence for top-level athletics and research offers the athletes of Swiss top-level sport ideal training conditions with sports science support. Accordingly, highly specialised infrastructures for athletics training and rehabilitation, state-of-the-art sports performance areas and interdisciplinary research are united under the roof of the OYM.
Lüchinger+Meyer worked alongside Lüscher Architekten and Axess Architekten on this unusual project, drawing on the combined strengths of the Zurich and Lucerne locations and the two specialist disciplines of structural and façade planning.
The planners reacted to the challenge of uniting the broad mix of uses in the compact structure with a combination of different load-bearing systems. Steel frame structures with composite ceilings were used for the wide-span supporting structures of the “stacked” ice, athletics and triple sports hall. The frontage building, on the other hand, is characterised by a skeleton structure with element slabs, composite girders and concrete columns, while the underground car park as well as the bracing cores and the main staircase were constructed as reinforced concrete structures.
A curtain façade of rear-ventilated, hot-dip galvanised sheet steel forms the raw, external surface. The iridescent patina of the galvanised sheets acts as a counterbalance to the reflective glass surfaces and gives a lively surface with light reflections and colour nuances. Pilaster strips, vertical frame elements, divide and rhythmise the large surfaces.
Thanks to the successful photographs by Regine Giesecke, we amateur athletes are not just onlookers facing the building, but also get a glimpse of the completed interiors of our project.
(Photos: Regine Giesecke)
