The Casablanca Stadium in Zaragoza is a sports club and social club founded in 1948, currently has some 25,000 members and covers an approximate area of ten hectares on the southern edge of town, next to the Imperial Canal of Aragon and the natural place Pinares of Venice.
The facilities can be grouped into two types: those dedicated to sports, and those for social area and bar / restaurant. The project approaches the reform and extension of the social zone and the bar – restaurant, which one organizes about the central square, which constitutes a paved space, terrace – viewing-point, towards that the existing buildings are orientated, formalizing a place of access, meeting and relation in prolongation of the headquarters and open to the natural landscape which looks out.
The relation between the program that is demanded and the place conditions, as well as the convenience of the execution of the intervention for phases, that it allows to support always in functioning the bar – restaurant, approachs towards a conceptual very clear, functional and organizationally very structured.
The proposal, therefore, contemplates two phases of execution: a first phase approaches the construction of a new building, gazebo, ampliation of bar-restaurant, occupying part of an existing road, and solving the uneveness taking the horizontal plane of the square towards the edge of the zones of tracks.
This new platform provides possibilities, both at a level of square as a lower level to accommodate new uses: sportive offices, press room, and polyvalent spaces… allowing other hand, solve, and organize routs and pedestrian access to the different levels (square and track zone).
On this platform and utilizing advantage the conditions of orientation and views, will elevate the volume of the new restaurant. It is conceived as an open space the landscape enabling a direct relationship with that surrounds nature by introducing her in his interior.
The light controlled by large structural ribs of the wavy facades that are oriented to the forest of pines, the suspended ceiling folded of wood, and the cracked skylight, creates an atmosphere that blurs the boundaries of interior space with the exterior.
Once executed this first phase that is completed by a new building in the later court and that contains all the services, kitchens in different plants, cores of communications, facilities … to solving service access, loading and unloading of the new bar – restaurant, it undertakes the second phase of recovery and adjustment of both existing buildings for complementary spaces of the social activities of the Club.
The idea of wanting to endow to the set of a certain entity and representation with a formal significant and unitary image leads us to doing a transformation of absorption of the existing thing with architectural solutions that answer to the new uses and that give place to new situations, promoting the idea of unit, formalization and integration of the already existing space, of the square.
The construction is solved with an right choice of materials: aluminum for the facades, in trays or lattice, glass and wood for carpentry, and in-situ concrete for the plinth and square.
Location: Zaragoza, Spain Architects: Sebastián Cerrejón Hidalgo and Jaime Magén Pardo Collaborators: Rafael González Barrida (Industrial Engineer), Gabriel Faj y Juan José Escobar (Technical Architects) Construction: Construction OCC Area: 21.489,68 m2 Year: 2010 Sponsor: Stadium Casablanca Canon Fundation Photographer: Jesús Granada