Municipal swimming pools

To weave with bricks.
Alfaro is close to clay fields where we can find important tile factories, which
provide bricks not only to the surrounding area but also to the whole peninsula.
This town shows in its buildings the earthy matter of face brick and the textures
resulting from its arrangement.
The new swimming-pools assume this material context and take the brick as the
basic element to put up, in a delicate arrangement, the exterior lattice-walls.
The wall turns into a weft whose changeable tightness allows the light to get in
gradually.
In a volumetric level, this project tries to reorganize the preexisting building
complex by taking into account the peculiar topography of its surroundings and
also by responding to the scenic value of the project’s field of action.
To achieve this we developed the idea of “weaving the landscape” with the
extension of some lattice-walls. In between them, the new building for the
indoor pools was placed, incorporating all its plan in a single floor. Its
horizontality enables it to generate as little noise as possible, respecting the
surrounding buildings. This building opens up eastwards and westwards,
overlooking the football field from the pool and enjoying the views to a wooded
mountainside opposite the gym.
La Molineta’s reservoir is East from the complex and it has a beautiful path
along its shore which was designed to have a walk or jog. The new building for
the pool is linked to this path by an ambulatory, built in between the lattice-walls
and the glass skin. Thus we get a pedestrian walk whose theme is water and
which may also work as viewpoint to the sports withouth suffering from the
hygrothermal conditions inside the building.