Topsportcentrum Bakala Academy

The Bakala Academy is a state-of the art training centre for professional cyclists and other athletes. The very idea of this building – a centre for high achievers – implies personal confidence and the elimination of anything that might be construed as representative of doubt. The spirit of the brave new post-war world thus becomes a useful, if not inevitable, point of reference. Nestled in wooded parkland on the outskirts of Leuven, the site provides an additional motive for the application of an architectural language with mid-century modernist overtones to a confidently crafted freestanding object. The architects summarise this eloquently and explicitly when they describe the building’s wheel-like form as ‘an affirmative shape that not only refers to cycling but also embodies concepts of dynamism, movement and “clockwork-precision”’. The plan, a drawing of two circles with different centre points, is simple. above the entrance level, we find two floors of glazed spaces, the upper of which is dedicated to the ‘altitude centre’, where athletes live temporarily in an artificially created low-oxygen environment. Plan and elevations are one long, consistent play on transparency and its simulation: views are exposed, framed and reflected into the workout cells and across the collective areas, while offering greater privacy within the consultation rooms and the accommodation areas.

Author: Christoph Grafe. This text has been published in the Architecture Review Flanders N°11. Embedded Architecture.