When waves crash against a quay or a dike, matter accumulates, floating over the lulling water. Chunks of polystyrene, branches, multicolor plastic bags, lost buoys, empty bottles, and the occasional dead fish get stuck between the oscillations of the water and the obstacle beyond which they cannot move further. If one lifts the eyes from the shore, watching towards the horizon, the sea appears as a clean and rather placid surface, slowly oscillating. The floating garbage looks like an accumulated summary of everything that might have been suspended far in the water and that has drifted ashore. The boundary between the liquid and the solid seems to intensify and gel the qualities of the saltwater, revealing the heterogeneity of the components fluctuating in it.

The Cathédrale des sports is located at the edge of a novel area of residential development in Bordeaux, called Brazza, where roughly 4,800 new housing units are being provided. It acts as a barrier against the ocean, because this building collects, compresses and intensifies the spatial relationships that in the whole neighborhood feel slightly rarefied and simplistic.

There is more complexity, overlapping of functions, intertwining of public and private spaces, three-dimensional richness– meaning across different floors and levels – in the Cathédrale des sports that in the entire rest of this sector.

Its positioning, just at the far end of hectares of former industrial land, allows it to amplify the interactions that are not strong enough throughout the neighborhood: that is perhaps one of the reasons why it is packed by users.

The general masterplan of Brazza is based on a rather crude juxtaposition of figure and ground. The housing elements appear almost as the lonely caricatural houses of the Monopoly game, scattered over squarish plots of land, still uncertain if publicly accessible or cordoned by fences, limited by parallel streets. Looking at the general plan, this looks as the repetition of the same trick where the three of four tiny wooden blocks have been placed over the rectangular property that could be named “Ocean Avenue” or “Vine Street” as in the notorious board game.

As of now, before the area will be fully inhabited and occupied, it is hard to decipher a modulation of various gradients of privacy and publicity within the neighborhood – what architects of the Team X such as Alison and Peter Smithson or Aldo van Eyck were trying to explore either through the concept of “clustering” or with the reading of the spatial thresholds in the urban realm across different cultures. At Brazza, either you are at home – in your apartment, well tucked inside one of the blocks, and more often than not deprived of a balcony or a terrace, or you are just outside, on a tiny sidewalk, in front of the entry door of a six floors building, with a discomforting lack of intermediate spaces for gathering.

The peripheral location of the site where stands the Cathédrale des Sports seems to have had the same – although in that case beneficial – effect of a moor against the sea. It captures and intensifies the whole kinetic energy of the area to its east, compresses it within a compact volume and sets together several bodies in motion. It de-multiplies over several levels the variety of spaces and sites that constitute the glossary of a vibrant urban realm, generating a set of exhilarating experiences.

It offers the café, the piazzas, the streets, the porticos, the garden, the dead-end, the scalinatas, the wandering, the occasional encounters, the peeping, the views, the terraces, the rooftop, the park even the mini-golf that Brazza seems to have deliberately forgotten to provide. Because the Cathédrale des Sports occupies the whole trapeze shape of the of its assigned plot, it does not suffer from the banal duality between built and void that plagues the rest of the neighborhood.

In fact, the building swallows all the void that it can place its teeth on, generating a hybrid condition: when you walk around it you never really know if you are indoors or outdoors. The Cathédrale des Sports can be described as an oversized concrete scaffolding, where the shift between closed and protected rooms and open-air plateaux is constantly at stake.


Whether on its northern side there will finally host a well-crafted park or nor, it does not really matter, because the Cathédrale des sports is a world in itself, oblivious and indifferent to its surroundings. Inside it one can find the unexpected surprises that if you look properly are to be found also in that patch of floating matter trapped by the sea currents under a pier. Your senses are permanently overwhelmed by views, sound, the wind, and smells. If you lift your glance and watch the residential neighborhood in front of it, it is like when you watch far in the ocean: there is not much going on out there, in any case nothing close to the intensity surrounding you.

The Cathédrale des sports corresponds to a rather novel typology: a series of spaces dedicated to sports are stacked over six floors, thus occupying a much smaller footprint than the fields, which within sports-arenas or open-air facilities tend to be placed side by side. Seven paddle-tennis and eight squash courts are combined with a 14 meters high climbing wall, 1,380 sqm of indoor gyms, a 9 holes minigolf, and a golf practice with 12 shooting booths on the roof. A large cafeteria is located at the ground floor, while administrative offices and seminar rooms are cunningly infilled within the structure. An extremely pragmatic building system of poured concrete and prefabricated beams and slabs offers a simple principle of horizontal plates, where the different activities are placed. These can be indoors or outdoors, thus significantly reducing the energetic footprint of the building, and its overall economy, as facades and partitions are either non-existing or simplified.

The mix of indoors and outdoors, means that the circulation becomes a relevant factor in the organization of the spaces, as in order to reach the different activities, corridors, passageways and stairs are generously provided, often with a cunning over-dimensioning. This is allowed by a certain administrative incertitude, well-exploited by the designers: within the French building industry, corridors, elevators or any other “lost” spaces can be calculated to the millimeters for housing or offices, while such a program does not yet have a clear economic and regulatory framing.


The building is a successful application of concepts that have circulated within contemporary architectural culture. It takes the taxonomy of seemingly improbable functions found inside the same buildings of the research and book by Atelier Bow Wow in Made in Tokyo (2001) as its conceptual basis and exploits this idea to its maximal consequence: it might be a tongue-in-cheek reference, that on the roof NP2F has placed a golf practicing facility, an activity rarely seen in Europe, and also one of the most cherished case-studies in the Atelier Bow Wow book – there the golf practice was placed over a parking for taxis.


The choice of an almost raw architectural language where dimensioning and proportions are dictated by what volumes are required by each sport and where materials and details are economical and pragmatic is inscribed within a functionalist lineage of French architecture, from Marcel Lods and Jean Dubuisson, through Jacques Hondelatte and Lacaton & Vassal to the more recent declinations of such ethics and aesthetics by NP2F’s fellows such as Bruther and Studio Muoto. Actually, the Cathédrale des Sports might be read as the very big cousin of Studio Muoto’s Public Condenser for the Paris-Saclay campus (2017), where sports fields, circulation and accessible public spaces are also stacked within a compact concrete frame.


The deployment of circulation across the whole height of the building is reminiscent of OMA’s pedestrian pathways within the Dutch Embassy in Berlin (2003) or the Performance center in Taipei (2022), with the difference that in these projects, it is a linear parkour, while in the Cathédrale des sports, the users are always offered numerous choices, because at almost every point one is faced with the dilemma of what route to take to reach the final destination, as the layout has been crafted in order to elicit multiple routes.

That generous offering of possibilities creates the same richness of experiences that one can experience in a dense urban setting: by wandering up and down the numerous stairs to arrive in time at the paddle-field, one has almost the haptic sensation of moving through the public stairs of Lisbon, or Hong Kong or Valparaiso.

If one thinks about it, it is rather logic that circulation is so prominent, often with unexpected deviations along the way, because a surprising view or a speck of light distract you from your destination: ultimately one is there to do sport. Little extra cardiac work is more than welcome!

I personally follow Winston Churchill’s advice: when asked about the reasons of his longevity, he replied that he never practiced any sports. I also don’t. Yet I like to walk, so, I was gifted one of those watches that track your steps and heartbeat, because after a certain age, if you don’t do any exercise, your doctor is happy to know that you still move a little bit. Even without using a racquet or lifting any weight, a visit to the Cathédrale des Sports, besides providing me with infinite moments of architectural bliss, has also contributed to reach my daily goals of minutes, steps and kilometers of “fat-burning” walk. And all that without even noticing it, just pleasantly getting lost.